It’s often asserted that Hedda Gabler is the most economical of plays, one in which every detail tells and no line is superfluous. Patrick Marber, whose recent-ish (2016) version of the play is used here, clearly disagrees - and I see his point: though Ibsen is rightly noted for his masterful integration of character and dialogue, he was sometimes guilty of labouring a point through repetition. Marber’s lean, fleet-footed adaptation corrects this occasional tendency and though its spare dialogue may not always sound idiomatic, it still manages to pay homage to the original while making it sound engagingly contemporary.
Marber’s text was commissioned by the National Theatre for its controversial production by Ivo Van Hove. Then, as here, the action was set in a ‘modern European city’ but it's to Marber’s credit that it could just as well be set in period and no-one would notice the difference. In Brian Davies’ production for Theatre in the Square, the Tesmans’ drawing-room had a bleak, temporary look, as if the whole thing could be packed away in a jiffy, a long way from the bourgeois clutter specified in Ibsen’s stage directions. For the most part, things moved at a good pace - dawdling tends to be death with this playwright - and the moments of comedy in the earlier acts are well-judged: unfortunately, the edge couldn’t quite be taken off some of the more obviously ‘purple’ moments and these point up the incongruity of setting the play out of period while retaining some of the original stage properties. What is Hedda doing playing about with unlicensed pistols? And why would a cutting edge ‘rock star academic’ like Loevborg be so quaint as to dictate his masterpiece onto A4 paper instead of using the Cloud?
There’s a simple answer to the latter question: if he’d done that, there’d be no play. Hedda’s destruction of the manuscript provides the pivotal scene of Ibsen’s drama - the one that most people remember. I once saw a radical updating where Hedda’s approach to her problem was to swallow the memory stick on which the magnum opus had been saved, but even that struck me as a cop-out (as well as being nothing that couldn’t have been solved via a stomach pump, or a laxative).
In the central role, Stacie Novotny presented a controlling, boarding school bully, all too credible as someone who might actually burn her rival’s hair off. The smallest actor on stage, this Hedda’s neuroses seemed rooted in a kind of feminine Napoleon complex which drives her on to destroy everyone she perceives as standing in her way. As her antipode, Thea Elvsted, (Hattie Brewis - who bears a disconcerting resemblance to Transvision Vamp’s Wendy James) is all softness and soft focus, warm and nurturing where Hedda is cold and bleak. But she is also,rightly, a discreet siren who by the end of the play is luring Tesman as effortlessly as she lured Loevborg.
In the play’s most difficult role, Tesman, (Guyene Munaseemy) offered an affable portrayal of a man who has never reached emotional maturity yet hasn’t noticed the fact: but, as so often, it was hard to imagine his courtship of Hedda, still less the marriage and honeymoon. John Irvine’s Scots Judge Brack - surely more Police Superintendent than Judge - was a a very credible ‘bent copper’ whose words and actions carried all the more menace for being subtly underplayed. Liz Kogan was a somewhat youthful Aunt Juliana and Linda Shannon made far more of the brief and relatively thankless role of Bertha, the gossiping maid, than any other actor I’ve seen in that part.
A very creditable go at this much-seen but always difficult piece. It runs until Saturday.
Reviewer - Richard Ely
on - 25/7/19
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