Ibsen’s Hedda is often described as the female Hamlet: the only real comparison is that both roles are spacious enough to take on the character of the person playing them. In Gareth Machin’s fine production, Kirsty Bushell – while adhering to Hedda’s destructiveness – invests her with a sexual allure and wild humour that prevent her seeming a cold-hearted Nordic ice maiden.
My own view of the play was shaped by a brilliant essay by Elaine Showalter that argued that Hedda is a figure of the past while her rival, Mrs Elvsted, represents a future in which men and women can work together as equals. Something of that comes across here. Bushell’s Hedda restlessly paces her own drawing room dwelling on ways of exercising power. But what I liked most about this excellent performance was Bushell’s awareness of the absurdity of her situation and that of humanity at large: when she urges Eilert Løvborg to kill himself “beautifully” she does so with a faint giggle and exits for her own death with the stoical smile of a woman who realises she has painted herself into an impossible corner.
The version is Brian Friel’s, last heard at the Old Vic in 2012, which weirdly has Judge Brack deploying American slang. Despite that, David Bark-Jones makes the Judge a creepily insidious predator and there is good work from Kemi-Bo Jacobs as a downright Mrs Elvsted and Damian Humbley as a distraught Eilert Løvborg. My main complaint about the Friel version is that it reinforces the idea that Hedda’s husband, whom Ben Caplan plays perfectly well, is a silly fusspot rather than a serious scholar. That aside, this is a bracingly intelligent revival.
• At Salisbury Playhouse until 2 April. Box office: 01722 320 333.
