Having recently returned from a six-month honeymoon, a lone woman stands in a dim living room. Her hair is cropped and she wears a long silk gown. She vibrates with volatility. This is the first of several striking images in Chelsea Walker’s stylish staging of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. And as the titular character drowns in the quotidian, wanton pleasures are found as catastrophe approaches.
There is an oppressive elegance to Rosanna Vize’s design: minimal and tasteful, full of straight lines and hard edges, this is a home in which it is hard to get comfortable. With evocative lighting by Joseff Fletcher and music by Robert Sword and Giles Thomas, the stage often feels like it’s breathing. It’s a rich theatrical experience.
The performances – a notch above naturalism – are attuned to their environment. Hidden storms rage in Heledd Gwynn’s poised Hedda, while Alexandria Riley plays Thea Elvsted with compassion. The women are complex, imprisoned in a world of male buffoons. There is an infantilism in Marc Antolin’s deftly performed George and Richard Mylan’s cunning Judge Brack, both contrasting with the dangerous sexuality of Jay Saighal’s Eilert.
While retaining its period setting, the cadence of Brian Friel’s script often sounds contemporary. The staging also refuses to provide the reassuring distance of a period setting, though it remains too measured to be benignly ahistorical.
Both in and not of our time, it has a striking and complex ambiguity, suggesting that a contemporary Hedda enjoys many structural privileges – domestic, economic and racial – that other female characters are denied. She has other options. Hedda with the good hair is able to walk out of the door. I suspect that the other women on stage are not.
At the Sherman, Cardiff, until 2 November.
