How do you solve a problem like Hedda Gabler
Last chance to see Hedda Gabler at the Coal Mine, extended to June 9 just as another production of the Ibsen play is about to open in Stratford on May 30. Liisa Repo-Martell adaptation (Moya O’Connell in the director’s chair) slightly tinkers with the text—there are hints here of Hedda having given up a dance career for a respectable, well-financed and propertied life—and I’m not sure it’s an improvement. Constraints on Hedda, if you look at the play, were such that there was no possibility of even imagining a life away from married respectability and motherhood. If I were to pinpoint the source of tragedy in the text, it would be that. She had no other calling except for men: her father the general, her former love(s), her husband. It is indeed a problem with no name. Hedda as a frustrated Isadora Duncan or Eleonora Duse, and this unfulfilled creative life as the main reason for her destructiveness - that is a different play. Ibsen’s Hedda is not a proto-feminist. We really like this interpretation (and that’s how Coal Mine promo materials are pitching the play) but we should resist the Betty Friedan retouch and face the fact that Hedda enigma remains hard to solve.
I’ve spent last two days talking to people who have a clue about theatre asking them why on earth Hedda Tesman née Gabler (the play honours her maiden name) gets married if she hates it so much. The play opens with the recently married couple, Jorgen Tesman, a devoted scholar of crafts in medieval Brabant (Ibsen can dead pan) and his wife Hedda (occupation: glamour, but bearing children awaits) returning from a protracted honeymoon which Jorgen used as a research trip. Already on her honeymoon the once-top drawer Hedda is second to something else. She was deadly bored with Jorgen, she explains to their mutual friend Judge Brack who comes for a visit, and in their playful and coded conversation he hints at the possibility of a triangle as a way out of boredom. Jorgen, it also transpires, has much less money than she expected and is accustomed to.
Notably in this production, the issue of Hedda’s pregnancy—which is hinted at by Jorgen in conversation with his aunt—is squished by Hedda’s adamant denial. Nothing happened on honeymoon. She is not gleaming and not plumper than before.
Into their lives pops Jorgen’s academic rival and Hedda’s old love Ejlert Løvborg. He is a recently sobered up alcoholic with an acclaimed book out and another on its way, with a woman who believes in his genius in tow. (As this is a claustrophobic, small town deal, Thea Elvsted also knows Hedda from school and used to have yen for Jorgen.) Ejlert is no stranger to iniquity - i.e. brothels - and has let the vice of drink get in the way of his productivity. It’s all very Victorian; Ibsen’s Hedda is not unlike her contemporaries or near contemporaries, Edith Wharton’s heroines, Emma Bovary, Wagner’s doomed couples who achieve sexual unification only in death, through Liebestod.
In order to test her power over Ejlert and his self-control, Hedda dares him to attend to the well-lubricated party at Judge Brack’s with Jorgen. Ejlert not only spectacularly falls off the wagon but also loses the new manuscript. Jorgen happens upon it on his way home and brings it to Hedda with every intention of returning it to its owner. Well, that wood burning stove is on stage for a reason - Hedda burns the manuscript (nihilism? jealousy? he’s not fixing his life if I can’t?) and upon receiving news of Ejlert’s death, she presumes the heroic act of suicide. The truth is more mundane, Judge Brack explains to her: the pistol that she had given him shot Ejlert accidentally in the stomach while he was brawling with a prostitute. Worst of all, Jorgen and Thea decide to reconstitute the lost manuscript from memory and salvage it for the world: this is the beginning, to quote a much later film, of a beautiful friendship.
Having discovered that neither her creative nor destructive powers amount to much, and that everyone around her is re-finding their purpose in life while she remains adrift—but also, we don’t really know why—Hedda goes to the other room and shoots herself with her father’s pistol. In the Coal Mine production, while the men are wailing, Hedda dances a frenzied dance before the lights go out.
There is no weak performance in the CM cast though I’m not sure what to think of Diana Bentley’s incredibly sexy Hedda. Is Hedda’s power over people primarily sexual? Did she have a debauched youth before deciding to get married? There are interpretations that suggest the opposite, that she she is closer to frigid or repressed. There’s a famous quote from the 1970s attributed to Claire Bloom that describes Hedda as “terribly frigid—and basically homosexual”. The epithet “icy” comes for the Maggie Smith/Ingmar Bergman version (“I wish a woman could review the play,” was Maggie Smith’s response. “She would understand about Hedda.”) Ivo van Hove’s take with Ruth Wilson at the National Theatre in 2016 was apparently icy too. The other day I watched Deborah Warner’s Hedda with Fiona Shaw on Alexander Street—a database of theatrical performances which you can access with the TPL card—and her interpretation isn’t about sexual desire either. She sets her Hedda in a Hammershøi painting: the colours are subdued, the light northern, and Hedda anything but a sex kitten.
I emailed theatre legend Diana Leblanc who is also a friend of this newsletter, and asked her who Hedda Gabler is and why on earth does she marry the guy she doesn’t love. I’ll give her the last word.
“Hedda is a mess. She worshipped her father. He represented masculinity, honour, social status, someone who took care of things, and of her. Though clearly he failed at that. Sounds like a pompous ass… He never paid attention enough to notice her, her inchoate desire to… what? Be someone, be remarkable, achieve something. And she did not have enough poise or imagination to pursue an independent path. Music? We don’t know is she is really talented, and if she were, nothing would have been done about it. She doesn’t know anything about independence from the male. She is very much a product of her time, resisting it, while being too imprisoned by it. How could she get out anyway? The time, for Heaven’s sake….. you update the play at your peril, and very carefully.
Hedda ‘s lack of resources, personal and from her environment, have denied her any sense of self… Why indeed does she marry Tesman? Well, the time again, she cannot imagine another way. Lovborg, in this moment of delicate balance, gives her crazed romanticism a place to alight. When he also fails, she is truly bereft. She is in a rage all the time, she reminds me of some Michel Tremblay’s women. She is consumed by it, burning up and made a little mad by it, until it becomes desperate, unbearable. Until there is only one possible way to stop the pain.
I haven’t seen or read it in years, so this remembering. I did always think it is a great part for an actress.”
To Stratford next month, then.