Which Norwegian playwright wrote A Doll's House?

Ibsen, in 1879, and the ending caused an international scandal - a wife walks out on her husband and children, and the door slamming behind her is probably the most famous sound effect in theatre. It was said to have been discussed at Copenhagen dinner parties with hosts requesting that guests not raise it.

He was forced to write an alternative. German theatres refused to stage it as written, and rather than let someone else rewrite it he produced a version in which Nora sees her children and cannot leave - which he called a barbaric outrage and did under duress to protect the text from worse. The original prevailed and the alternative is now a curiosity.

He resisted being made a feminist. Addressing a Norwegian women's rights society in 1898 he said he had never consciously worked for the women's cause and was not entirely clear what it was, that his task had been the description of humanity - which the audience received politely. The play works either way, which is possibly the point: it is about a person discovering they have been performing a role, and the fact that the role was a wife's is what made it unbearable to its first audiences.