It's an attempt to do speaking opera. What I'm doing can work against the melodrama and the music, and parody the melodrama. In the love scenes, the men are picked up by the women ? the men are swept off their feet ? so I can get a lot of comedy from it. It's a comedy of opposition.

The fact of it is that the men's world was actually smaller than the women's world. That the patriarchy was safe was illusory. We're taking a kind of post-modern view of it and saying that this was a male narrative, and women for varieties of reasons ? psychological, historical, biological, everything ? who have bought elements of it, are now turning.

This certainly steals an acting style that was used in the clubs in Munich in 1900 and picked up by (playwright Bertolt) Brecht. We associate it, and rightly so, with some of the high melodrama that was used for silent films. So sometimes, with this style of acting and the piano in the background, you get the idea that you're in a silent film melodrama.

It's like we're going to a kindergarten with those little chairs ? but the women don't fit. The doll concept of life was the men's world, and their idea was to try to fit the women into it, to cut them down to size ? to put them in little wigs, with eyelashes and makeup and make them fashion items in this particular world ? so they could control it.

Ibsen wrote a kind of Times best seller; he wasn't 100 years ahead of his time -- he was 10 years ahead. It was the feminist anthem of its time -- the YMCA of feminism.