Saturday 14 November and Sunday 15 November, visual theater mastery takes center stage as acclaimed Franco-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire presents its haunting adaptation of A Doll’s House at İBB Şehir Tiyatroları Muhsin Ertuğrul Sahnesi as part of the 30th Istanbul Theatre Festival by IKSV. Directed and co-adapted by Yngvild Aspeli alongside Paola Rizza, this dark, sensory reimaginning of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 foundational drama translates Nora’s psychological imprisonment into an atmospheric study of illusions, societal masks, and human fragility. By fusing life-sized puppetry, physical choreography, live vocal soundscapes, and shadow play, the production bypasses literal period realism to craft a surreal physical metaphor for domestic captivity that stands out as a major international highlight of this year’s festival program. Tickets are available on Passo.
Founded by director and puppeteer Yngvild Aspeli, Plexus Polaire has earned a distinct international reputation for expanding the technical and thematic boundaries of contemporary figure theater. The company is celebrated for taking monumentally complex literary texts and reimagining them through a visceral, highly visual lens where life-sized puppets interact directly with human performers. Previous triumphs, such as their landmark adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, cemented Aspeli’s signature style: an uncanny blending of human bodies, hyper-realistic figures, meticulous lighting design, and original scoring that transforms literary narrative into a dreamlike physical reality.
In this staging of A Doll’s House, Aspeli directly confronts the literal premise of Ibsen’s title, placing Nora inside a world constructed like an actual toy house operated by external forces. The production employs double manipulation, eerie visual scale shifts, and bird motifs to explore how societal expectations reduce living human beings to curated objects. Supported by a haunting score composed by Guro Skumsnes Moe alongside vocal arrangements by the Oslo 14 Ensemble, the performance abandons conventional parlor-drama tropes to emphasize the claustrophobia and psychological reckoning at the heart of the original play.
Rather than viewing Ibsen’s 19th-century masterpiece strictly as a historical period piece, Plexus Polaire treats the text as an ongoing conversation regarding modern identity, performance, and self-liberation. The resulting staging promises a striking entry point for both contemporary theater enthusiasts and lovers of visual arts, showcasing one of European theater’s most inventive companies pushing classical drama into bold new territory.
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