As the lights went down on Ivo van Hove’s production of Hedda Gabler at the National in London, the woman in front rose to her feet and applauded in a way I’ve seldom seen. This was not the warm-hearted, part-zombified, part-obligatory standing ovation of Broadway. Each muscle of her body was engaged. Her legs, her thighs, her upper body, neck, head were all applauding, her arms pounding. She had a message to convey to the actors. What she was saying was: “Thank you.”
For what? I believe it needed no decoding. Some deep, unsayable truth had been uttered – and received.
Hedda Gabler is a difficult play, as are most of Ibsen’s dramas. We produced A Doll’s House at the Young Vic a few years ago. The year before, we did a play by Jon Fosse. Fosse, the second-most-performed Norwegian playwright, came to lunch, so I asked him: what does A Doll’s House mean?
He replied: “The Germans understand Ibsen, the French, the Dutch. Only you English get him wrong. You think he’s some kind of progressive, an artistic social worker. No. Ibsen is the poet of destruction.”
So what’s Hedda Gabler about? The way women are oppressed by patriarchy, yes, maybe, but the other female lead in the play escapes. Why can’t Hedda? It’s about her depression. But a play just about a chemical imbalance would never have caught the world’s imagination.
It’s about all these things and more, none of which fit together. It’s about the contradictions – irresolvable, murderous – involved in being alive in that skin.
Ruth Wilson’s performance explains nothing. She plays the contradictions. It’s entirely grown up, entirely generous in its willingness to evoke a total, unresolved image. The woman who leapt to her feet saw the fullness of her own life on stage and thundered: “Yes, I do exist, yes my life is just as irresolvable, just as contradictory.”
Or that’s what, in that instant, her action seemed to me to mean. And by then, anyway, half the house were also on their feet applauding rapturously, deeply committed.
And this was one of those crazy European-style shows which, I read, are “infecting” (unlovely word) our theatres. And they’re also unpopular, I read.
On Wednesday, our revival of another “European” production, Simon Stone’s version of Lorca’s Yerma, went on public sale. The entire run was sold out by the end of the day. Our A View from the Bridge, A Streetcar Named Desire, Measure for Measure – plus plus plus plus – have all had queues along the street.
When I was asked to respond to David Hare’s comments about “over-aestheticised European” productions that “camp up classic plays”, I thought: “Surely, just at this moment, there are more important things.”
But in dark times we need each to do what we can from the centre of our individual strength, skill, understanding and experience. Theatre-makers – playwrights, actors, directors and the rest – need to tell the hard, dark, contradictory truths as we see them, as generously and in as grown-up a manner as we can manage, offering sustenance each to each.
