What kind of woman walks out on her husband and kids? Joanna Wane asks former Shortland Street star Laura Hill to please explain.
The final moment in A Doll’s House as Nora Helmer walks out of her cage – leaving behind her husband and three children – has gone down in legend as one of the loudest door slams in history.
Now she’s about to walk right back in that door.
When Henrik Ibsen’s iconic play premiered in Denmark in 1879, a storm of outrage reverberated across Europe. Even today, almost 150 years later, a special abhorrence is reserved for women who abandon their families – a weight of judgment that’s rarely applied with the same force to men.
So actor Laura Hill isn’t sure whose side the audience will be on when she steps on stage as Nora in Auckland this month for the New Zealand premiere of A Doll’s House, Part 2.
“When a woman becomes a mother, there’s still the idea her entire identity is subsumed by that. She is a mother first and foremost, whatever her job or other aspirations might be,” she says.
“To abandon that in any way, or to be perceived to abandon that, is not just a dereliction of duty, but like an abomination of nature. It feels that extreme.”
Hill, who’s just come off a Roger Hall comedy, is right up for the challenge of taking on such a complex and potentially divisive role.
Back in 2001, she was a virtual unknown in her mid-20s when she began a seven-year run on Shortland Street as Toni Warner, the party-girl nurse who settled down with Dr Chris Warner (the fourth of his many doomed wives).
A teenager when the show’s first episodes went to air, she remembers standing on Cuba St in Wellington and literally going weak at the knees when her agent rang to say she’d got the part. A week later, she’d packed up her life and moved to Auckland.
According to Shortland Street lore, Toni was the first character to complete the full “hatch, match and dispatch” trajectory: giving birth to son Harry (suffering a subsequent miscarriage after falling down the stairs), tying the knot with Dr Love (later surviving a poisoning attempt by one of his lovers) and losing a kidney in a serious car crash.
After 180 episodes, she was finally killed off in 2008 after coming down with norovirus and being given faulty pharmaceutical drugs. Honestly, it makes you wonder what on earth you’ve been doing with your time.
Hill doesn’t want to give away too many spoilers but it’s clear that Nora – “a kind of Joan of Arc of marital relations” – hasn’t been wasting her time, either.
Conceived by award-winning US playwright Lucas Hnath, A Doll’s House, Part 2 opens with Nora knocking on the same door she slammed shut behind her when she walked out 15 years before. Her husband and children haven’t seen her since.
No longer the “doll wife” trapped by suffocating marital conventions, the mother of three hasn’t looked back, reinventing herself as a successful novelist and a symbol of feminist rebellion.
The reality, of course, is more complicated. Emmy, who was little more than a baby when Nora left, has understandably mixed feelings about her mother’s sudden return.
Hill says the play doesn’t fall into an easy sense of victimhood for any of the characters.
“There’s something confronting for Nora when she comes back and thinks she’s taken this righteous stand, that she’s sort of a visionary, but that crusade isn’t being picked up in the way she would hope by her own daughter. But then what right does she have to expect that when she has walked away?”
Rebooting the story of such a seminal literary character, long after the founding author’s death, seems an audacious move by Hnath, whose earlier work Red Speedo was staged by Auckland Theatre Company in 2017 – the same year A Doll’s House, Part 2 opened on Broadway.
A New York Times review called it an “unexpectedly rich sequel”, reminding us that “houses tremble and sometimes fall when doors slam, and that there are living people within, who may be wounded or lost”.
Nora’s story is based on the life of a real person (named Laura, as it happens), one of Ibsen’s good friends who took out a fraudulent loan to pay for her husband’s health treatment without his knowledge – an act he repaid by committing her to an asylum, although they were later reunited.
In Part 2, the period setting remains critical to the narrative, but Hill is fascinated by how incendiary the original play was and how relevant the broader conversation on gender remains today.
“It was just such a bomb in society that challenged all the ideas of the time,” she says.
“Portraying a woman who, in the interests of seeking personal fulfilment, leaves her husband and children, was absolutely scandalous. People were invited to dinner parties and told, ‘Please do not discuss Ibsen’s play’.”
The sequel doesn’t punish Nora with some ghastly fate, in the way so many fictional female characters are made to pay as a sop to society for their perceived transgressions. Nor is she entirely exonerated for the mess she’s left behind her.
Hill, as a happily unmarried woman with no children, intuitively feels a lot of empathy for Nora and her courage to defy convention.
At 49, she’s the owner of a mortgage-free home in Avondale (largely thanks to that steady Shortland Street gig, which paid off the last of her student loan and got her on the property ladder) and has been meaning to read Australian writer Clementine Ford’s latest book, I Don’t, which makes a passionate case against marriage.
She’s also stopped making excuses for the fact that she’s never had a yearning for motherhood or been haunted by a spinning biological clock.
“I used to say that if I’d met the right person at the right time, kids might have been part of my life. But then I thought, ‘Why do I feel I need to say that?’ I don’t have kids and I’m happy with that decision. I don’t feel that my life is lacking because of it.”
Other than ableism, perhaps, Hill thinks sexism is the last ‘ism’ that remains tacitly acceptable in society, with women often held to different and higher standards than men.
Yet she isn’t without some sympathy for Torvald, Nora’s husband, a privileged member of the patriarchy whose strictured world is completely upended when his “little wife” (as he calls Nora) deserts her post.
“I’d be curious to see what it is in the original language,” she says, “but in the English translation, it’s ‘my little squirrel’. These diminutive terms. And she has the balls – well, that feels like the wrong metaphor – to say, ‘I’m more than that, and I deserve more than that’.”
Where that fits into the current zeitgeist of self-care interests her, too.
“The idea that it’s okay to put yourself first. You can’t pour from an empty cup, that sort of thing. There’s a lot of validity to that, but once you lose a sense of community or connection to the exclusion of the people around you, that’s where self-care can become selfish.
“Nora is somewhere on that spectrum, figuring out where her life sits now and what emotional obligations or duties she has to the people she left behind. And even though she’s kind of going, ‘We don’t need marriage, it’s the end of it’, there are arguments still to be made for love.”
Born in the UK, Hill moved to New Zealand when she was 5 and describes herself as a genetic amalgam of her parents. Her father, Peter Hill, was a police officer with Scotland Yard’s vice squad before he turned to writing detective novels and for TV shows like The Bill. Her mother, Helena Ross, is a theatre actress whose TV appearances included a brief stint on Shortland Street in the late 90s, just a couple of years before nurse Toni made her debut.
Hill, who left Victoria University with a first-class honours degree in English literature, bypassed drama school altogether. She still keeps a scrapbook filled with stories that have been written about her through the years, from her many theatre roles to playing a hardened crim who befriends Rita West (Antonia Prebble) during a prison stint in Westside.
Behind the scenes, she’s also worked as a storyliner and scriptwriter, finishing an eight-year stint on Shortland Street last year. Now back on the freelance market, she’s about to reprise her role as the steely, morally ambiguous lawyer Miranda Temple in the 11th season of The Brokenwood Mysteries, which is being shot now.
As well as playing that recurring character, Hill has co-written three episodes of the show with Roy Ward, who’s also an on-screen regular as the gay vicar, Reverend Lucas Greene.
His affectionately bickering love match with Dr Roger Plummer, the local psychiatrist, is one of the series’ most charming sidelines.
Dennis Buchanan, the other defence lawyer who makes an occasional oily appearance, is played by Shane Cortese, who was Hill’s brother, Dom, on Shortland Street, and her lover in the TV drama series Nothing Trivial.
Such is the intertwined world of our domestic acting scene.
The “cosy murder genre” is having a moment and Brokenwood is enormously popular worldwide, says Hill, who’s joined a couple of fan groups on Facebook.
“In France and Germany, and in America and Australia, they’re absolutely clamouring for the next episodes.”
Hill shares her home with two rescue cats, Portia and Claudio – Paws and Claws, for short.
A copy of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House sits on her bookshelf and, in one corner of the room, there’s a log burner filled with crumpled pieces of paper.
“That’s my little weirdo thing,” she says, with a laugh.
“When I’m learning lines, I write them out on the back of spare bits of paper, because that helps them go in my brain. Then I screw them up and burn them.”
One of the first roles she played after being killed off on Shortland Street was the lead in a theatre production of Jane Eyre – her blonde hair dyed to a dark brunette to help exorcise the ghost of Toni Warner.
Jane is another singular female character who forges her own path, although her happy ending is marriage to someone she loves, while Nora’s path to self-fulfilment in A Doll’s House, Part 2 doesn’t involve being with a man.
“People have loved each other and partnered up and been together for aeons,” says Hill.
“But marriage, as we understand it, is relatively recent in human history and I see nothing wrong with the idea of reassessing what marriage is and the roles of people within it.
“The really interesting thing about the play is that the allegiance of the audience will shift. Hopefully it won’t break up any marriages, but there’ll be some interesting discussions afterwards.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning feature writer on the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
Our celebrated star could have the after-party of her dreams come award time on Monday.