B's documented interest in A Doll's House goes back to 1948 when he adapted it for a planned Hollywood film version which, however, never materialised (Steene, 2005: 80). Much later, on April 30, 1981, B's production of Ibsen's Nora, as the play is often called in Germany, opened at the Residenztheater in Munich. Virtually the same text formed the basis for his second production of the play on the Big Stage of Dramaten. It now carried the traditional Swedish title Ett dockhem.

A performance intended for a southern German audience in the early 1980s must be different in some respects from one intended for a Swedish public around 1990. Besides the temporal gap, there is the geographical one, the sociopolitical and theatrical climate in Bavaria being rather different from that in Sweden. There is the linguistic difference, a German translation of Ibsen's play being necessarily more removed from Ibsen's Dano-Norwegian text than a Swedish one. Moreover, in Munich B was forced to deal with a language which was not his own. In Stockholm he was in that respect on a par with his actors who furthermore shared his social and cultural referential system.

In addition to these general distinctions, a more specific one may be added. As earlier noted, the Munich Nora was part of a triad, the other plays being Strindberg's Miss Julie and B's own Scenes from a Marriage. As the titles indicate, the three plays all focussed on man-woman relations: Helmer-Nora, Jean-Julie, Johan-Marianne. The triad soon became known as the B project. In Stockholm A Doll's House was presented as an independent play. Nonetheless the two productions had much in common.

Ibsen's play was drastically cut; nearly one-third of the text was removed; the Nurse, the Maid, the Porter and two of the three children were omitted. The three acts in the play were replaced by fifteen scenes.

It is a common misconception that the Helmers live in a house of their own. But the text explicitly states that they live in a “flat.” To make this clear to the spectators, B opened his production with a black-and-white projection on the curtain of an art nouveau apartment house (Olofgörs, 1995: 223).