Tinkering with the established classics is not a modern preoccupation. The Greeks did it and so did the Elizabethans. But the twenty-first century has seen a sharp spike in the number of contemporary dramatists interrogating, arguing with and sometimes ‘correcting’ their elders (though not necessarily betters). Cordelia Lynn’s Hedda Tesman, a ‘response play’ to Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, is part of this spike, though Lynn deserves credit for writing her own play and not attempting to hijack the original by giving it their own spin.
In Holly Race Raughan’s production for Headlong, the dramatis personae (all six of them) of HEDDA GABLER find themselves bodily transferred to the early twenty-first century but they haven’t all made the journey intact. Hedda remains a General’s daughter and a houswife, albeit now one in late middle-age, married to the same plodding duffer of a husband and feeling that her life has passed her by. An accidental pregnancy curtailed a promising academic career of her own and left her with no option but to follow in the trail of a man less capable than herself. Quite why a high-achieving woman like Hedda would settle for this is never satisfactorily explained in Lynn’s text but then that is a problem with all updatings of this play - though, as in Ibsen, we sense that the glowering presence of her late father, who continues to balefully survey her in the form of a living-room portrait, may have had a lot to do with it. Hedda is estranged from her thirty-year old daughter Thea (no longer a school friend but still a rival), whose own return to the family home after her mother and father have themselves returned from time spent in America, is the catalyst for the play’s events.
Hedda still finds herself frustrated by the attentions of George’s cloying and superannuated Aunt Julie and frustrated by the awkward ‘home help’ Bertha (no longer an inferior ‘servant’ but an agency employee with her own problems and her own family). There are other attentions, too: Brack remains the sly and oleaginous ‘family friend’ with an eye for the main chance, but ‘Elijah’ (Elbert Loevborg in the original), in what may be the plays’ most radical re-imagining, is now a young doctoral scholar, and contemporary of Thea, for whom Hedda had more than a slight tendresse when her husband supervised his research work. The intellectual friendship formed between Elijah and Thea provides an interesting (and Freudian) twist on Ibsen’s original configuration of relationships.
There is certainly a ‘new light through old windows’ effect in seeing these familiar characters transmogrified into their plausible twenty-first century equivalents and for those who know the play, there is the added fascination of observing Lynn’s new twists and emphases - even if it doesn’t quite stifle the question:was it really necessary? Lynn had added a number of soliloquies for the famously epicene Hedda, including an impressive self-interrogation and while these are impressive in themselves, they add little to our understanding of this opaque character.
In terms of performances, the production can’t be faulted: in the central role, Haydn Gwynne offers a high definition portrayal of a woman, still vital and attractive, who feels she has literally nothing left to live for. No-one who hears her load an expletive with otherworldly despair will ever forget it! Anthony Calf proves an excellent foil as her worthy but dull husband and Jonathan Hyde is marvellously incisive as the sardonic Brack. Excellent performances too from Natalie Simpson as Hedda’s Millennial daughter and Jacqueline Clarke as an Auntie who seems to hail from Ambridge.
A fascinating if not essential look at an object from a different angle, then, and definitely worth seeing to catch a splendid ensemble in action.
Reviewer - Richard Ely
on - 7/10/19
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