"Burning Down the House". Schwarzman Centre

If the New Theatre is the equivalent of ITV1 on a Saturday night, all hot-dogs-while-you-watch musicals from the 80s, and the Playhouse is a mixture of BBC1 and BBC2, pivoting from Pirandello to panto at the drop of a stage weight, then the Schwarzman Theatre, in these early days, is more akin to BBC4: experimental, artistic, specialist. Their first production, Robota, addressed the ethics of AI, a subject at the core of the Schwarzman mind palace. The second, When the Blackbird Sings, was a re-examination of Oxford’s marginalised past. And now Burning Down the House is a theatrical adaptation of the research work of an Oxford academic.

If there’s one city in the UK where that rarefied approach should guarantee packed houses, it’s Oxford. But out of term-time, with students in short supply, the Schwarzman may have to consider where its discerning audience is going to come from. Burning Down the House, an enjoyable and accessible romp through a little-known corner of Henrik Ibsen’s back-catalogue, nearly filled the stalls last night, but the side seating and the circle were bare.

How does a brand-new theatre establish a thriving audience? It’s a complex problem, but at the very least, a sign on the road pointing people towards the building would be helpful. At present, unless you’re a student of the Humanities at Oxford, you would be forgiven for walking straight past the Schwarzman and ending up at the Ring Road.

It will take some time for this new venue to find its true clientele (and vice versa). But meanwhile, the programming team should be applauded for a brave and committed remit. Burning Down the House is inspired by the research of Kirsten Shepherd, Professor of English and Theatre Studies. Shepherd has discovered that Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House was based on the life of one Laura Kieler, a young writer who went to Ibsen for help, and then found that, in addition to not helping her, he stole her life story for his most famous play. The marketing blurb on the flyer asks, ‘What would you do if Ibsen stole your life?’ - not a problem that has ever troubled me, until now.

It’s an intriguing question, and in a week when another Scandinavian giant, Erling Haaland, is suing a Norwegian airline for putting a ponytail on one of its planes to show support for the national team, this production raises fascinating issues about how much right we have to control the story of our own lives. Laura Kieler, played by Jacoba Williams, is the embodiment of feistiness, and Ibsen (Peter Clements) pushes back with all the smug complacency a 19th-century European male can muster. A Doll’s House is often seen as a foundational feminist text. Breach Theatre’s production suggests at least some of the credit should go to Kieler.

History is littered with women who didn’t get the recognition they deserved, from Dorothy Wordsworth (who literally wrote of the famous daffodils, ‘They tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind’) to Rosalind Franklin and Hedy Lamarr. But Kieler’s case is, to be fair, less convincing. It was her circumstances, not her work, that Ibsen took as inspiration, and in trying to make a case for her as the true source of A Doll’s House, the play sometimes loses its way. Kieler herself leaps from being a caring wife who borrowed money to help improve her husband’s health, to being a reckless spendthrift, with no warning or explanation. And the scene at the end, where she forces Ibsen to take part in an extract from one of her own plays (about how he’d wronged her) is notable for its two-dimensionality. The production doesn’t shy away from Kieler’s writerly failings. But if she isn’t an overlooked genius, it’s unclear exactly what wrong it is asking to be righted.

Instead, the fun of the evening arises from a host of meta-theatrical contrivances. After a faux-stilted opening from an Oxford professor (played with terrifyingly convincing awkwardness by a gleeful Sophie Steer) welcoming us to a conference, Ibsen himself emerges to address the audience about his life, only to be heckled by Kieler, who storms the stage and hijacks the lecture. After three minutes, we’ve descended through three levels of reality. Kieler’s story dominates the stage from that point onwards, with Ibsen relegated to a supporting role. It’s an expletive-laden tirade, but it’s burning with passion. How true to Kieler’s own story it is we cannot know. And there’s an irony underlying the whole enterprise: a play accusing Ibsen of appropriating Laura Kieler’s life has itself appropriated Laura Kieler’s life in order to make a play about appropriation.

Sensibly, writers Ellice Stevens and Billy Barrett never suggest that A Doll’s House is anything other than a vital and monumental work itself (they even remind us that in Denmark, where it premiered, it led to a law granting married women the right to control their earned income). Rather, they are giving the luckless and forgotten Kieler one night of the stardom she craved. After 150 years, I think that’s the least she’s entitled to.