Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Richard Eyre, directed by Martha Henry
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
August 10-September 29, 2012
Hedda: “I often think there is only one thing in the world I have any turn for.... Boring myself to death.”
The Shaw Festival’s new production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler has an ideal cast but its direction leaves much to be desired. If I did not know the director was theatre veteran Martha Henry, I would have assumed it was an inexperienced younger director who thought classic plays need to be more explicit to appeal to a modern audience. The result is the least subtle production I’ve seen of one of Ibsen’s most complex plays.
In other hands Moya O’Connell would make a magnificent Hedda. As Joanna in Present Laughter this season she shows she can be sultry, vindictive and capricious all at once – a perfect set of character traits for Ibsen’s heroine. The first mistake Henry makes is to have O’Connell begin her performance at too high a level of rebelliousness so that there is no room for her to go. The Tesman’s villa has been decorated to Hedda’s specifications while she and her husband George (a painfully mousy Patrick McManus) have been away on a six-month honeymoon. Yet, Henry has Hedda toss red velvet accent cushions about the room, as if she loathed them, from the very beginning of the play until near the end when she even lobs one out the back french doors. This, along with kicking the furniture and striking the aged servant Berta (Jennifer Phipps, who expertly feigns total confusion) with a hat and clothing, is meant to reveal Hedda’s frustration to us, but a single acton repeated throughout the play suggests that Hedda’s frustration remains at the same level when, in fact, it does not.
In a well-directed production we ought to see some development in Hedda, how her frustration with virtually aspect of her life grows until it becomes unbearable. Henry has O’Connell remain in a the same overwrought state from start to finish. It’s a difficult task that O’Connell manages to bring off, but both the character and the play as a whole create much more tension if we see how the accumulation of circumstances gradually make Hedda view her life as not worth living. The plot demonstrates this, and Hedda states her realization near the end, that every action she initiates blows up in her face: “Oh, what curse is it that makes everything I touch turn ludicrous and mean?”
Martha Henry does not realize the full implications of the play because she treats it as if it were simply another proto-feminist work like Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). To that end she emphasizes Hedda’s hatred of being pregnant. She reacts violently when anyone remarks that she has “filled out”, though designer William Schmuck doesn’t aid in this perception since the gowns he gives Hedda are all extremely tight-waisted. Hedda hates being tied to Tesman’s relatives like his Aunt Juliana (Mary Haney as a woman made strong by her convictions), who devotes her life to caring for an invalid. Juliana views her devotion as giving her life meaning, while Hedda sees it as self-imposed slavery.
A clear sign that the play is not an iteration of A Doll’s House is that it already contains a woman, Thea Elvsted (Claire Jullien, revealing an unshakable strength beneath a meek exterior), who like Nora has risked social opprobrium by leaving her husband and children. Indeed, Ibsen deliberately contrasts Thea with Hedda, who does not have the courage or will to do what Thea did. Thea used to fear Hedda who pulled her hair in school. Henry has Hedda do this several times to Thea, which makes it hard to see why Thea would ever return to see her. Henry has Hedda pull Thea’s hair in her final encounter with her, thus contradicting Ibsen’s stage direction “Passes her hands softly through Mrs. Elvsted's hair” and again making it appear as if Hedda does not change in the course of the action.
We should see that there is an internal conflict in Hedda’s world view, but in this production we don’t. On the one hand, Hedda is a general’s daughter who likes to shoot pistols and ride horses, and longs for absolute freedom. On the other hand, Hedda is a general’s daughter who believes in discipline and would not do anything to create a scandal. One of the many reasons that the role is so meaty is this interplay of contradictory desires. Unfortunately, Henry is interested only in the freedom-loving side of Hedda, and this means that certain aspects of the play don’t make sense. Under Henry, Hedda’s relationship with the formerly dissolute philosopher Eilert Løvborg (given dangerous intensity by Gray Powell) is unclear. Thea has reformed the whoring, alcoholic Løvborg and has inspired his greatest work. Hedda hates both the fact that Thea, whom she regards as socially beneath her, should have had such influence and that Løvborg has lost his wild bacchanalian ways.
It is not just that she is a woman, but that she is both romantic and class-conscious that causes her to wish to live vicariously through Løvborg rather than undertake any scandalous action herself. She views her getting Løvborg to drink again after having been teetotal under Thea as a triumph, even though it leads to Løvborg’s dissipation and shame. She believes she can encourage Løvborg to commit suicide as a noble act, a rebuke against society and the world, but in fact the deed ends grotesquely. Unfortunately, Henry has had O’Connell make Hedda so disagreeable it’s difficult to see the romantic notions that inform her actions.
It is fitting that Hedda should fall into the clutches of the insidious Judge Brack (Jim Mezon, an expert study of coolly calculated evil) because he combines the same opposing qualities that she has – outward respectability but inward wildness – and possesses the same desire to manipulate other people. Brack, however, is much more practiced in his craft than Hedda, and Hedda comes to see him as the distorted reflection of everything she thinks she is.
The one thing Henry achieves is to present Hedda’s suicide in its full contradictory nature. It is an escape from a world in which she finds she is useless, it is an escape from the sordid power Judge Brack has over her and it is her attempt to make the “beautiful” gesture that Løvborg failed to do. Why Henry does not have Hedda shoot herself in the temple as Ibsen specifies and why Henry asks for a Tarantino-like spray of blood for a startling effect that lowers the tone to grand guignol remain mysteries.
The present production does not supersede the Shaw’s previous production in 1991 with Fiona Reid as Hedda and Jim Mezon as Løvborg. The performances of Haney, Powell and Mezon are worth watching simply as examples of great acting. O’Connell could be a superb Hedda. Let’s hope she has the chance to do so with a director who allows her to explore the character more fully.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Moya O’Connell. ©2012 Emily Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2012-08-12
Hedda Gabler