In the Ibsenian rat trap of Hedda Gabler, little is more dangerous than a woman with nothing to do. No bed to make, no child to hold, no love to give. There are, at least, guns.
Long deemed a masterpiece of literary realism, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler has attracted persistent adaptation since its 1891 debut. Divisive from the jump, it was called a “hideous nightmare of pessimism” and “one of the most wonderful and subtle conceptions of woman in the whole range of dramatic literature.” Hedda herself has been played by iconic divas like Eleonora Duse, Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith, Kate Burton, Isabelle Huppert, and Cate Blanchett, to name a few. The play (and character) has a similarly lengthy history being reimagined by male theatre makers, like playwright Patrick Marber and director Ivo van Hove, whose blood-spattered National Theatre production from 2016 starred Ruth Wilson as a captive Hedda, degraded by the men who surround her. As bold a telling as that may be, whose is it? Or perhaps more pertinently, who is it for?
The Coal Mine Theatre’s modest, cunning production, adapted by Liisa Repo-Martell and directed by Moya O’Connell, shows Hedda as she is, without any new scaffold meant to validate her actions. Joshua Quinlan’s set and costumes reference the original time period, with contemporary garments approximating late nineteenth-century silhouettes. We’re both here and there, no illusions.
Repo-Martell’s text smoothly orients us within Hedda’s inner life while still honouring her obscurity. There is a striking prelude, with Hedda (Diana Bentley), seen through the gap in a sheer curtain at the deep end of the thrust. Bathed in basement moonlight, she pounds out a tune on the piano, back muscles contracting with the effort. Wherever she is, it is not peaceful. Darkness, then light. Hedda is gone, as is the middle place in which we first found her. It is now just a room, grey and brown with vases of flowers that do little to cheer the atmosphere.
Set over the course of two extremely long days, Hedda Gabler introduces us to a newly married couple, Hedda and Jorgen Tesman, just returned from a six-month European trip. The honeymoon is literally over, but it didn’t sound all that great to begin with, according to Hedda. Now confined to the (heavily mortgaged) “house of her dreams,”1 a parade of in-laws, ex-suiters and rivals strain Hedda’s instinct for hospitality, stoking her barely suppressed fury.
Bentley’s Hedda enters a room as if smelling something sour. Quietly seething from the first, Bentley shows it in her smiling cruelty; her childish glee in little mean games. Under O’Connell’s direction, Hedda circles her visitors as if trying to locate the thing that will settle her enraged spirit. She rarely stops moving.
Hedda Gabler is a character, one might argue, made for us to dislike. She has been called a narcissist, a sociopath, irredeemable, demonic. But it is her opacity that makes her so compelling, the paucity of desire outside of what she refers to as beauty. “Part of her enduring greatness is that we will never entirely understand her,” wrote Hilton Als in his 2006 review of Blanchett’s Hedda. The urge to project legibility onto her is a feature, not a flaw.
In a suite of essays on Ibsen’s women from her 1974 essay collection Seduction and Betrayal, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote of Hedda:
She marries as if she had somehow been stuck with a bad colt at an auction. The idea of becoming a mother is unbearable to her. But her peculiar Philistinism, the form it takes, has something to do with a woman’s life, with their lack of projects, with their failure to understand a certain kind of intellectual and creative concentration, the pleasure and the labor of it.
While Hedda may be unable or unwilling to “put [her] hand to something” (a line that pops up several times in Repo-Martell’s script), Coal Mine’s Hedda is adapted, directed, and creatively moulded primarily by women. Emily Haines of Metric composed the surging interstitial music and Claudia Dey and Heidi Sopinka of Horses Atelier provided key costume pieces. The pleasure and labour of intellectual and creative concentration is embedded in their partnerships, even while maintaining the atmospheric trappings of Ibsen’s play and Hedda’s failure to thrive.
Bentley sharply embodies her characterization, radiating Hedda’s lack of ease in the smallest of movements. Her Hedda feels like an image that won’t resolve, moving in and out of focus. It is mesmerizing when she finds stillness, as when she sits with her back against the wall, watching the devastation she cued unfold at the room’s centre. Her expression says, “I made this.”
Two people sitting side-by-side in a theatre will almost always see a different play. That’s one of the occult joys of live theatre2 and the great trick of Hedda Gabler. In my attempts to empathize with her, I wondered if Hedda could be read as someone who yearns to create, or perhaps write. The two men she positions herself between are both scholars and authors. Her husband, Jorgen Tesman, (Qasim Khan, discreetly adolescent in his spectacles and cardigan) prefers books to his wife. Conversely, Hedda and the mercurial Lovberg (Andrew Chown) once enjoyed a secret relationship where he confessed his deepest shames, his drinking, his dissolute behaviour to her. She soaked it up, but didn’t know what to do with it other than break off the relationship and marry the more socially promising Tesman.
And then there is Thea Elvsted, Hedda’s old schoolmate, Lovberg’s current “comrade,” and Tesman’s former flame, appearing like a ’90s sweetheart in her Anthropologie-esque sweaters and calf-length floral skirts. Leah Doz’s Thea is guileless and tender, bursting with virtuous feeling. Clutching her leather satchel, Thea seems poised to be a light snack for Hedda, someone cute for her to bat around.
Hedda is most vividly alive when torturing Thea, her hair-pulling molestations relaxing into something like an embrace when her maid Berta, played with salty omniscience by Nancy Beatty, calls on them for dinner. Earlier, she sits on the chaise with Lovberg to consider Thea, both of them commenting on her “loveliness.” Left alone, Hedda’s bullying of Thea feels more authentically charged than her relations to the men who fuss and rut around her—like Shawn Doyle’s smarmy Brack. It might just be hatred, but Hedda’s runs very hot.
This clawing intimacy between Hedda and Thea, representations of past and future, bring to mind two eponymous novels. Thea, a poor governess turned wife to her patron is reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Jane, too, eventually marries her employer, the Byronic Mr. Rochester, but not before their wedding day is interrupted by his first wife Bertha, the attic-dwelling madwoman of infamy. In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), the title character is dead long before the story even begins, her influence such that the novel is named for her and not its narrator, known only as “the second Mrs. de Winter.” Like the second Mrs. de Winter, it is Thea who comes through at the end of Hedda Gabler—indispensable to Tesman, immediately covering the sitting room floor with the papers she carries in her ever-present satchel.
“They are an odd group, the Brontës,” wrote Hardwick in Seduction and Betrayal’s opening essay. “The success of Jane Eyre, the fame that came to Charlotte, were fiercely, doggedly earned. She had struggled for independence not as an exhilaration dreamed of but as a necessity, a sort of grocery to sustain the everyday body and soul.” Jane, Thea, the second Mrs. de Winter. Each is haunted by a woman who is either dead or will be soon. For them, too, success is fiercely, doggedly earned.
The Brontës, despite preceding her, are Hedda’s successors. As Hardwick wrote:
Hedda Gabler is a bourgeois woman of the nineteenth century, but in sloth and disaffection she turns away from the props and crutches by which people desperately tried to give such life hope and warmth. She has no respect for what is called “a woman’s world,” and even less for a life of work or ideas.
Perhaps now, fifty years after Hardwick wrote that gorgeously unforgiving diagnostic, the state of feminism-informed theatre invites us to handle Hedda with care, acknowledging all the anger that so many women would have carried, that so many still do, in their varying ranks of inclusion and freedom. Hedda is eternally on her way out, and what we see are the moments before she becomes, like Rebecca and Bertha, a first wife. “We cannot forgive Hedda Gabler for what she does,” writes O’Connell in her director’s note. “And we cannot stop watching her.” Without a woman like Hedda, what would there be for us to watch?
Hedda Gabler runs until June 9 at the Coal Mine Theatre. Thanks to Suzanne Cheriton and Coal Mine for having me.
As her adorable milquetoast of a husband is fond of saying.
Unless it is a militantly crafted touring production of Jersey Boys, in which case we will probably see the same thing, years and miles apart.