Tuesday 09 March 2010
Hedda Gabler: A Heroine Years Ahead Of Her Time Has Her Moment @ Theatre Royal Brighton
'Hedda Gabler…Hedda Gabler…Hedda Gabler" , whispers the voice of the lover to his ex mistress - a sexual roughness in his voice matches the quiver in hers - and you could hear a pin drop in the long pause that fell upon the stage at the end of his words.
Hedda (Rosamund Pike) and Loevborg (Colin Tierney) are watched by her husband, Tessman (Robert Glenister) and Judge Brack (Tim McInnery).
As they stare at the couple on the couch almost unseeing they seem to represent the two great pillars of oppression in Hedda's life; Marriage and Society. (Hedda Gabler (by Ibsen) Theatre Royal, Brighton, 8th March).
For she has married to obtain and retain respectability, and to a man that bores her with his aunts who are all talk of children and tea-time visits.
This is all due to society, the society of Tessman and Brack, where women are either ridiculed and enjoyed as clever whores or held up as model wives while being held down in chains of an absurd quasi-religious tradition, a bit like today perhaps.
Norway, in the time of Ibsen was a country that had, ironically, been known for its freedoms and had no real aristocratic class.
Yet it remained unaffected by the French Revolution and was undermined by that curse of any age, fundamentalist religion.
As ever men prevailed, albeit still in hock to convention and conformity, at least in polite society for the Judge seems to know his brothels and their madams awfully well.
It is no accident that Hedda Gabler was written after a non-consummated relationship with a young 18 year-old Viennese girl, where Ibsen was said to have felt despair at his inability to grasp fully the sexual possibilities on offer, due to his own timidity.
Hedda Gabler has the same sense of frustration running through it. Her husband is frustrated about position and money, Brack about power and Hedda herself, everyone else is looking for something more than they already have.
Hedda claims to be bored, but really she is frustrated and that is something else. Boredom can be a kind of indolence, a wandering of the mind in no direction, but frustration is the clear desire for difference even when that difference cannot always be pinned down.
For me the difference that Hedda seeks is true freedom, and this is always unobtainable in traditional, market-capitalist, fundamentalist or totalitarian societies.
Her blundering about, looking for the way out, causing casualties has often led to her being criticised in the past as a bad or evil person.
But it is the warders who make the prison for the innocent man/women, and they should not be shocked to get hurt as the victim fights their way out.
We are not all created to 'fit in' or do the right thing, some of us are created to seek the freedoms from which all would benefit, and this is even more important in our nation of technicians and bureaucrats where people swap their right to strike for a credit card, their freedom to act for the freedom to be told what to do, their own common sense for a health and safety patch, and their cultural heritage for an I-phone to play with on the bus.
In the end she takes the ultimate way out to remove the power of men and society from her life.
Later, in the next century, many women in similar societies took up a Kalashnikov and an education. These days they all want to be in the Pussy-Cat Dolls, a very glamorous route back into sexual slavery, I think.
This production of Hedda Gabler is an absolute triumph of the highest order. Set designs are exquisite, the direction is spot on and the acting is as about as near to perfect as I have seen in ten years of reviewing theatre. Pike and Glenister are brilliant.
It takes great skill to tease out the kind of issues I have highlighted, not to over or under-do the play and its leading character, but this production really delivers.
It will probably be the best theatre production of this year in Brighton, and perhaps even one of the best in the last few years.
I was glued to my seat and so will you be.
Hedda Gabler, written by Henrik Ibsen and produced by the Theatre Royal, Bath, runs at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, until Saturday 13th March – See www.ambassadortickets.com/Theatre-Royal-Brighton for times and prices.
by: Howard Young
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A Bullet Each For Marriage & Society
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