The dawn of modernism?

I was thinking about what I’d missed in 2013. Lots of things, for sure. But, reading the perceptive blogpost From the Choirboy Motel on the Young Vic’s production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House* made me ache with regret that I’d not taken the trouble to go and see it.

It made me think of the impact that the play had in Melbourne when it first opened at the Princess Theatre in 1889. Perhaps expecting the usual sort of drawing room comedy, there were rowdy scenes following the première. The critics were universal in their condemnation of the supposed moral degeneracy of the drama. “Excessively didactic,” noted The Argus in Melbourne, “… insufficiently dramatic… the character of Nora… unnatural,” and so on.

The play had originally opened in Norway ten years earlier, the first English translation being commissioned from William Archer by Janet Achurch** and husband Charles Charrington, who took the lead roles, initially in London, then in Australia and New Zealand. It caused ructions wherever they took it.

Was this play the dawn of modernism?

Curiously, another less controversial play taken on the Australasian tour by the Charringtons was an adaptation of a Rider Haggard story entitled Devil’s Carefoot by the upcoming (now substantially forgotten) Australian playwright, Haddon Chambers.

*http://choirboymotel.com/2013/08/18/from-a-dolls-house-to-parliament/ 
**Janet Achurch photographed by H Walter Barnett (probably in Sydney), 1889