The French-Norwegian puppetry company Plexus Polaire brings A Doll's House to the Barbican Theatre from Wednesday 3 to Saturday 6 February 2027, with artistic director Yngvild Aspeli as Nora and life-sized puppets as the rest of the household.
Plexus Polaire returns to the Barbican Theatre from Wednesday 3 to Saturday 6 February 2027 with A Doll's House. The French-Norwegian company was last on that stage in 2025, when its Moby Dick sold out, and it works in the same manner here: puppets, live performance, music, light and video assembled into a single visual world.
Ibsen's drama is left intact in outline. Nora keeps house with Torvald, the arrangement looks settled from the outside, and underneath it she has begun to examine the roles she has been handed. What changes is who else is on stage. Artistic director Yngvild Aspeli performs Nora and also voices the puppets who make up the household around her, so that every other member of the family speaks in her voice.
The production takes its cue from a single moment in the second act, the tarantella, and follows the dance back to the spider it is named after. Spiders accumulate as the evening goes on, built at varying sizes, until the line between the house Nora lives in and the nightmare she is having stops being clear. The Barbican advises that the piece contains upsetting scenes and dark themes, and guides it at 14+.
It is performed in English and runs 1 hour 20 minutes without an interval. A free post-show talk follows the performance on Thursday 4 February, open to anyone holding a ticket for that day.
The booking sits inside MimeLondon 2027, which takes the first month of the Barbican's spring programme with three productions in all. The other two, Tout / Rien and Absence and Presence, run in The Pit in January; A Doll's House is the strand's only main-house title.
Standard tickets start at £24. Young Barbican tickets, for 16- to 29-year-olds, are £12, school groups of ten or more also book at £12, and access tickets start at £20 with a free essential companion seat where one is needed. The production is one of nine events in the Barbican's spring 2027 theatre and dance season.
