Based on the life of Laura Kieler, a close friend of Henrik Ibsen’s, and first performed in 1879, A Doll’s House initially met with controversy over the way it criticises nineteenth-century marital norms. Ibsen confronts the problems with an exclusively male society, and a woman’s place within that. Nora Helmer commits fraud in order to obtain the money with which to save her husband’s life. Over the course of the play, her dealings are discovered and she ends up making an enormous life decision that goes against the societal grain.