About the lecture
The play Burning Down the House had its world premiere in the University of Oxford’s new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in October 2026. It was developed from an idea by Kirsten Shepherd, who approached Breach Theatre in 2021 to suggest a collaboration to explore the life and work of Laura Kieler and to tell the true story behind Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. For almost five years, Kirsten and Tzen Sam (doctoral candidate at Oxford and research assistant on the project) worked with Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens of Breach Theatre to explore research materials on Ibsen and Kieler: letters, speeches, journals, plays, novels, and other literary and biographical sources. Literary translator Gaye Kynoch joined the collaboration to provide the first English translation of Kieler’s play Men of Honour. The idea was to see if this material might make some kind of performance.
This lecture discusses Burning Down the House and the process that made it—from the initial idea of bringing Laura Kieler out from the margins to the exploratory conversations between the academics and the practitioners to the workshops with actors to begin devising what would eventually become the show. The lecture reflects on the ways in which research and practice interact, the unique affordances of such collaboration as well as the challenges, and the institutional contexts and complexities that help to shape such work, from funding to performance space to marketing to evaluation. Finally, the talk explores some of the stakes of this work—for A Doll’s House, as a play that is studied in British high schools and universities; for Laura Kieler’s profile and legacy; and for the project’s capacity to speak to questions of biographical and artistic ownership, appropriation, and mediation.
About Kirsten Shepherd
Kirsten E. Shepherd is a Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford. She was educated at Yale (B.A.), University of Oslo (Fulbright Scholarship), and Oxford (DPhil) and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bergen. She has published extensively on Henrik Ibsen, most recently a new Oxford World’s Classics edition of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Laura Kieler’s Men of Honour, and Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (OUP 2025) with Tzen Sam and Gaye Kynoch. She is currently working on Henrik Ibsen: A Very Short Introduction for OUP, and a new interdisciplinary, collaborative project called Ibsen’s Avalanches.
She has also published extensively on the interactions between theatre and science, including the books Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006), Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015), and The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science (2020) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.
Kirsten also founded LitHits, a project that helps break down barriers to reading through short, unabridged excerpts from literature.These are available in a free weekly newsletter at lithits.substack.com, and now in book form: Ten Minute Book Club: Deep Dives into Short Reads (Bodleian Publishing, 2026).
Faculty web page:https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-kirsten-e-shepherd
Remote attendance
Please note that this seminar will be streamed. To participate remotely, please register at this link at no later than 26 November. A Zoom link will be sent on the day of the seminar. Please also consider that the lecture is primarily intended for participants on campus, and therefore not optimized for remote streaming.
Contact
For more information or questions about the lecture, please contact the Director of the Centre for Ibsen Studies, Giuliano D'Amico.