TV Reviews : Couple’s Values Clash in PBS’ ‘Doll’s House’

It’s a given that Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” arguably the best play written in the 19th Century, can’t work without a strong and complex heroine. When Nora walks out on her husband and children and slams that door, it’s one of the great endings--and one of the most lingering sounds--in theater.

What many productions don’t always make clear, though, is that it’s not just Nora’s play but also her prig of a husband’s. Their clashing duet of ethical codes--and the burnished performances of English actors Juliet Stevenson and Trevor Eve--illuminate the BBC’s “A Doll’s House” on “Masterpiece Theatre” Sunday (at 9 p.m. on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, at 8 p.m. on KVCR Channel 24).

The director, David Thacker, working from a translation by Joan Tindale, doesn’t appear to have cut the play at all. The running time, almost 2 1/2 hours of dramatic text, is long by television standards, but the cumulative weight of the production justifies every minute.

The luminous Stevenson catches the blithe facade and inward vibrations of Nora, her husband’s “little songbird”-turned-liberated woman. Her awakening is breathless as she shouts at her uncomprehending, traditional Victorian husband: “We have never exchanged a serious word on a serious subject . . . I have been your doll-wife . . . I must find out who is right, the world or I . . . I am first and foremost a person!”

But Ibsen, who maintained that he wasn’t a feminist, created more than a woman for our time. (It’s amazing to think the play was first staged in 1879.) There’s a core of characters here, weaving in and out of Nora’s big, warm house and all exceptionally acted, who suggest a kind of Chekhovian chamber piece.

Foremost among them, of course, is the child of his time, the smug and loving husband Thorvald, who is thunderstruck by Nora’s declaration of freedom. Eve (who played the title role in “Parnell and the Englishwoman” on “Masterpiece Theatre” last December) gives the husband a rather dashing and lustful panache. It’s a performance that embraces Ibsen’s extended arm of sympathy, because even in the husband’s knuckleheadedness, he does in his way love Nora.