Theatrically the ground has been well-prepared for Ibsen’s 1879 social tragedy to enter the set lists. Last year began with the promise of - what’s the collective noun? - a suburb of Doll’s Houses in prospect. It ended with a virtual new town’s worth of productions.

It’s probably not been so popular here since the 1970s when a spate of productions coinciding with an early wave of the women’s movement included two West End stagings and Joseph Losey’s film with Jane Fonda as Nora. In his own day Ibsen denied he had been writing a feminist tract, so cutting himself away from the only people not morally shocked by a story in which a bourgeois wife not only walks out on her husband but firmly puts him in his place before doing so.

Most memorable recent productions were one in a London fringe theatre the size of a doll’s house, Sue Lefton’s at Hampstead’s New End Theatre, and on a larger scale Stephen Unwin’s for English Touring Theatre. Both had remarkably fine Noras - Rachel Joyce at Hampstead, Kelly Hunter on tour, but both directors had clearly perceived the play as far more than a one-woman showpiece.

Thus Sue Lefton: “I love Ibsen, he deals with unhappiness but searches for the positive.” Nora’s once so controversial exit is, says Lefton, not easy for her to make. Nor is it a finality, a reverse sort of happy ending. “It’s going to be tough for her but she is going to realise her potential. It’s a healing, positive search though it means going through depression and sadness”.

Black curtains gave the tiny white stage an epic feel, characters “off” sitting in corners and Nora’s important change into severely practical clothes for her departure seen by the audience. A central room with four others off it was a common Scandinavian design says Lefton; more importantly the epic feel in a mini-space caught the opposing gravity and centrifugal force of society’s “metaphorical corset” on women and “passion bursting at the seams”.

Ibsen was powerfully affected by ancient Greece; he talked of looking at, through and beyond Greek sculpture as, Lefton says, he wanted to look at, through and beyond middle-class hypocrisy. “The Greek theatre was full of passion, they were grappling with the dawn of civilisation. In my setting I wanted to have a sitting-room, a haven, which was at the same time an arena for argument like the ancient Greek arena.” She believes everyone in Doll’s House is in their private prison - the men are struggling too.

The symbol at New End for this mix of haven and harangue was the large sofa dominating the stage. A sofa is a fine place to relax; it also provides a space for two people to argue across. Lefton returns to Greek drama to discuss what must be the vital question for anyone playing Nora - reconciling the assertiveness of the final act with the doll-wife behaviour prevalent in the first two. “It’s a recognition like that of Oedipus looking inward when he has gouged his eyes out. When Torvald fails her test, Nora perceives her state in a new way. The only change is she’s begun to think - it’s a terrifying thing, to think.”

Lefton compares Leontes’ jealousy in Winter’s Tale: “Like a heart attack in the body it’s building up but happens very suddenly. Through Doll’s House you do get glimmers of perception - the evidence is there but Nora doesn’t yet understand how to interpret it.”

Yet she finds Torvald the hardest part. He too is corsetted by the age and carries the burden of male power - “if there’s an emphasis in my production it’s heartfelt sympathy towards men who are unable to weep.” She draws a final Greek analogy comparing Nora and her friend Kristina Linde with Sophocles’ rebellious Antigone and her pacifying sister Ismene. For Stephen Unwin, Mrs Linde is an important character too - a woman who comes in from the cold and in taking the opposite path from Nora provides a counternote of optimism not always noticed in discussion of the play.

Unwin describes the play through a musical analogy: “Ghosts is more mysterious, Hedda Gabler bigger - a great big symphony, but A Doll’s House is Ibsen’s string quartet - an utterly precise chamber piece.”

A visit to Norway heavily influenced him. Ibsen sets the action over Christmas and “In winter daylight runs 10.30 am to 3.30 pm. Most of the time is spent in the dark. And Norway’s a frontier country. A bleak, tough world.”

He sees Torvald as tragic, the only character whose bruising is exposed openly on stage - Krogstad, Kristina and Rank are coming to terms with their earlier woundings, “He’s absolutely and sympathetically of his period. He’s worked hard and got ill through overwork. Completely within the restrictions of his period, class, rank, he’s presented with realism.” Unwin sees even his Act Three drunkenness, which in modern productions allows the unleashing of his sexuality, as that of someone for whom sobriety is as a rule vitally important.

As at New End, the set reflects the director’s main thrust. Here it is the play’s realism. The set was based on a Danish painter of the time named Hammersh?i “What I feel strongly is if you take Ibsen as an equivalent of Edvard Munch you’re on the wrong track. He’s a materialist - physically that’s very important. The characters talk of home and it should be a safe place in a cruel world.”

Unwin’s production represented Nora’s overall trajectory in a number of ways, for example in prefiguring the crazed tarantella, at once the summit of her doll-wife life and an expression of her private terror. This echoes both her happy dancing round the room in Act One and her agitated darting after Krogstad has left her with his bombshell. In Act Three “She’s able to say things she’s thinking for the first time - these are not things she’s always known, she’s discovering as she goes along”. So the scene must be played for realism not as Shavian rhetoric and it’s a final tribute to the old Norwegian’s stage sense that Unwin says “We followed Ibsen’s stage directions - they tell you how to do it.”