In Mark O’Rowe’s new version of Ibsen’s 1890 drama, the dialogue sounds like an overheard telephone conversation. “Right.” “Sure.” “OK.” “Christ.” “Bye.”
Pared back, lucid, sometimes blunt, it is uttered by characters wearing impeccably tailored 19th-century dress. In Annabelle Comyn’s production, the drawing room of the newly married Hedda and Jorge Tesman is elegantly furnished, with high windows and a free-standing interior door frame. Beyond that, the set is exposed with glass and steel girders and surrounded by empty space, creating a series of visual frames with a distancing effect. It is as though the characters in this drama of marital suffocation are frozen in time, in a period photograph.
Catherine Walker’s Hedda is statuesque and doll-like, her boredom with Tesman (Peter Gaynor) expressed in small hand gestures and petulant shrugs. By persistent questioning, she coaxes confessions from her former schoolmate, Thea Elvsted (Kate Stanley Brennan) and from the dissolute writer Ejlert Lovborg (Keith McErlean), as if trying to discover what motivates them, or makes them different to her. “Are you alive?” she asks Lovborg. Hedda’s surface calm masks a fear of the male public world, evoked here in filmed projections of footsteps on pavements, accompanied by a soundtrack of white noise, and the whispering of crowds.
These design elements bring a welcome sense of psychological layering to a production that at times is so controlled that it becomes almost inert. Even when Hedda throws Lovborg’s manuscript – a book that could be the equivalent of Marx’s Capital – into the stove, nothing seems really to be at stake. The best scenes are when Hedda is sparring with the manipulative Judge Brack (Declon Conlon), although these also could do with more jeopardy. Brennan’s underplayed Thea seems too wan to have had the courage to leave her husband and find a purpose in life – precisely what Hedda can’t do. In its cool restraint, this production doesn’t succeed in convincing us that her impulse to shoot herself comes from more than a fit of pique.
• Until 16 May. Box office: 00 353 1 878 7222. Venue: Abbey theatre, Dublin.
