A Doll's House, with its believable, everyday characters, and its sense of opening a door onto a real marriage facing common problems, shocked European theatre-goers and critics. Not only was this not what they were used to seeing in the theatre, but also addressed social problems that were under everyone's nose but that certain sectors of society liked to pretend did not exist. These included the hidden aspects of the outwardly respectable nineteenth-century marriage and the 'women question