Burning Down the House

Written by Ellice Stevens and Billy Barrett
and devised by the cast

Directed by Billy Barrett

drawing on the research of Professor Kirsten Shepherd and Tzen Sam, and adapted from new translations by Gaye Kynoch

Welcome

Welcome to the Schwarzman Centre's new theatre, a home for theatre lovers of all kinds, and a place where artists, researchers and audiences come together to create and experience adventurous new work.

Working with a fantastic ensemble, we’ve been piecing the story of Laura and Ibsen’s fraught literary relationship - fleshing out moments and following clues in the documents uncovered and translated by our research partners. In doing so we’ve embarked on a process parallel to Ibsen’s - of transforming real life struggles into drama, with all of the ethical and creative complexities that come with that. We’ve found that this is a story that resists easy answers, or a simplistic villain and victim narrative - instead posing complex, knotty questions and presenting two fiercely intelligent, equally flawed adversaries.

Ellice Stevens and Billy Barrett
Breach Theatre

John Fulljames and Josie Bamford
Schwarzman Centre Cultural Programme

Key Information

Age Guidance: Recommended 14+

Running time: Approximately 80 minutes, no interval

Performance dates: 25 September to 10 October 2026

Performance times: 7.30pm, with a matinee on Saturday 3 October at 2pm

Press night: Thursday 1 October 2026

Tickets: £17.60 to £22 (Previews 25 to 30 September, £14.30 to £18.15). Students £10.

Access performances:

Chilled Performance, Saturday 3 October, 2pm
BSL Interpreted Performance, Saturday 3 October, 7.30pm (including post-show Q&A)

Co-produced by Breach Theatre and the Schwarzman Centre

Key artwork: Rebecca Pitt

Artwork photography: Rich Lakos

Burning Down the House event page

About the play

Who has the right to tell which stories? Where's the line between inspiration and exploitation? Does any of that matter, if the story's good?

Scandinavia, 1879. Playwright Henrik Ibsen scandalises audiences with A Doll's House, whose heroine Nora walks out on her family. But to one woman, the story is all too familiar. Laura Kieler, a young writer who had turned to Ibsen for help, finds that he has stolen her harrowing circumstances as the play's raw material. As Ibsen's literary fame ignites, Laura's life falls apart, and she must fight to save her reputation and her relationship with her family.

In Burning Down the House, Laura steps out of Nora's shadow and takes a theatrical flamethrower to Ibsen's version of events.

Burning Down the House revisits Henrik Ibsen's most renowned work, A Doll's House, shifting the focus onto Laura Kieler, the real woman, writer and friend of Ibsen whose life story he rewrote into the character of Nora, without her knowledge or permission. A writer herself, Kieler responded with her own play, Men of Honour. Burning Down the House asks urgent questions about the ethics of biography, the silencing of women, and who is allowed to tell another person's story. In doing so, Breach's new play provides a powerful corrective to the history of A Doll's House and dramatises one of the most significant acts of literary appropriation of the nineteenth century.

Related Events

Drawing out some key themes of the production, and its cultural context, these free events offer a deeper dive into the development of the show and the stories it tells.

These events are free to all Burning Down the House ticket holders but should be booked in advance.

Devisors and Performers

Creative Team

Production

Burning Down the House has been supported by a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship (2022 to 2023) and by the TORCH Knowledge Exchange Innovation Fund (2022). In March 2024, Breach Theatre were awarded a major grant by Ibsen Scope to develop the piece.

Henrik Ibsen and Laura Kieler: A Doll's House, Men of Honour, When We Dead Awaken, translated by Gaye Kynoch and edited by Kirsten E. Shepherd and Tzen Sam, is published by Oxford University Press.

Enter the world of BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE

"We're delighted to be bringing Burning Down the House to the Schwarzman Centre, following such a fruitful collaboration. It feels very vital and right that the production starts its life in Oxford. Laura Kieler's story taps into contemporary conversations surrounding the ethics of storytelling, explores the blurry line between creativity and inspiration and questions who has the right to tell what stories. The subject matter is complicated, murky and thrilling."
Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens

The Ibsen story behind the play

"As part of my ongoing academic work around Ibsen I have long been fascinated by the story behind A Doll's House, wanting to bring it out of the margins and footnotes of Ibsen studies. It's a story that I think readers and audiences of Ibsen's plays would find interesting, as well as deeply relevant to our own times. A major part of the story is Kieler's own subsequent play Men of Honour, her attempt to regain agency over her life and work."
Professor Kirsten Shepherd

"I approached Breach to collaborate on making a play about this story because of their impressive catalogue of work that brilliantly interrogates historical representations on stage, through a documentary lens and innovative theatricality. It felt like the perfect fit to bring this radical, moving and edge-of-your-seat story to the stage. It's been 5 years in the making."
Professor Kirsten Shepherd

Not Nora: reclaiming Laura Kieler

"Critics have long discussed Ibsen's contribution to feminist theatre. And yet, despite writing one of the world's most sensational feminist dramas, Ibsen bristled at being called a feminist. It is intriguingly, disturbingly ironic that the making of A Doll's House involved the appropriation of a real woman's story, with dire consequences for her and her family for which he never publicly apologised. 'I am not Nora,' she insisted many times. Burning Down the House cracks open what she meant by that."
Professor Kirsten Shepherd

Biographies

Devisor/Performers

Creative Team

About Breach Theatre

“Incessantly smart … a company of creative archivists” - The Guardian

Breach is an award-winning theatre company led by co-Artistic Directors Billy Barrett, Ellice Stevens and Executive Producer, Sally Cowling. We uncover captivating stories - from a 1970’s experiment into teaching dolphins English, to a rape trial in Renaissance Rome, to the impacts of homophobic legislation – in order to provoke new perspectives and illuminate the times in which we live.

There’s a rigour to our research and a playfulness to our work; combining a forensic documentary approach with bold and inventive devising. We are always in search of the “truth” about big issues, without claiming any sort of objectivity ourselves. Our shows are full of subversive humour and unafraid to be passionate and political.

★★★★★ “It might be set in 17th-century Italy, but the consistently exciting Breach Theatre's new show feels uneasily current.” -  Alice Saville, The Financial Times on It’s True, It’s True, It’s True

★★★★ “ Raw, joyous, psych-rock freak-out” - The Scotsman on Tank

★★★★ ‘Empowering and gut-wrenching... full of righteous anger and euphoric 80s synths’ The Telegraph on After the Act

With thanks to all our creative collaborators who contributed to the development of Burning Down the House. 

Also with thanks to Breach’s Board of Management:  Grace Chapman, Richard Hatherell, Dela Hini, Stewart Pringle and Harry Tennison. 

About the Schwarzman Centre

The Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities is a stage set for boundless creativity. Under one remarkable roof, academia and culture are breaking a new kind of common ground, bringing seven humanities faculties and research institutes together with world-class libraries, collections, exhibitions, cinema, music, theatre, and performance. Based at the University of Oxford, open to all.

We invite outstanding artists to collaborate with researchers to develop and create new cultural work. We are particularly grateful to Professor Kirsten Shepherd, Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Catherine's College, whose research on Ibsen and Laura Kieler is the foundation of this production, and to Tzen Sam, DPhil candidate at the Faculty of English and Jesus College Oxford, whose research support has been invaluable. We are also grateful to literary translator Gaye Kynoch for her translations of Kieler's play, articles, letters and journals.

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