From Ibsen's expository dialogue, entire new scenes were developed by British dramatist David Mercer and integrated through a number of invented sets.

Set in 19th century Norway, Ibsen's A Doll's House focuses on the married life of banker Torvald Helmer and his wife Nora.

He proudly thinks of himself as the family's breadwinner and protector, but he remains unaware of the secret that Nora holds: She had saved him when he had become seriously ill and very nearly destitute.

Indignantly, Torvald pours scorn on his wife for her morals, intellect, and financial sense; he cuts short her explanations and declares that she will be allowed no hand in raising their children.

[4] The cinematographer was Gerry Fisher, who had a long professional relationship with Losey beginning in the mid-1960s during the director's British period, including Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971), and Don Giovanni (1979).

[11] The combined effect of Losey's alterations have been praised by some critics for giving the work a cinematic quality and making it "a film rather than a photographed play".

Critic Colin Gardner has commented on one example at the start of the film: "just as we see Nora and Kristine skidding excitedly across the surface of the pond, we also spot a static, black-coated figure lurking ominously outside the teahouse in the exact centre of the shot (i.e. at the spatial vanishing point).

The sweet purity of youth is thus already tainted by the acrid taste of the social outcast – the future man of vengeance – and the source of Nora's own financial enslavement.

The director, who had a history of stormy relationships with his leading ladies, earned the ire of both Fonda and Delphine Seyrig before the film was released.

[16] Losey, for his part, grumbled that Fonda had "little sense of humor" and "was spending most of her time working on her political speeches instead of learning her lines".

[24] Charles Champlin likewise praised her performance, and wrote that her contemporary persona dovetailed well with Mercer's dialogue, which "skillfully drops the stilted period rhetoric without going colloquial or slangy".

"[27] More bluntly, Rex Reed wrote that Fonda's "star personality" undercut her performance in an otherwise admirable production: "One never believes her as the macaroon-munching birdbrain or the charming coquette or the toy wife.