Ruth Wilson has brought a new dimension to Hedda Gabler. I have seen compelling Heddas before, but I have never seen an actor make so convincing the character’s toxic aestheticism: she demands that suicide be committed “beautifully”. From the opening moments, when she appears with her back to the audience, splayed out over a piano, Wilson’s Hedda has recoiled from everything around her. Her contempt is beyond rational explanation. Despair has bleached her. She is an addict, hooked on disgust.
Ivo van Hove’s production underlines the aestheticism. Jan Versweyveld’s design is an enormous white box, at points flushed golden with light. Everyone on stage could be an installation in an unforgiving art gallery. Wilson, her face flickering with fastidiousness, provides the most interesting moments in a production that moves at an unusually uniform pace, as if everyone had taken a bit of Hedda’s drug. Van Hove has banished corsets and aspidistras, and with them part of the play’s historical interest. Some dynamics are newly exposed – not least because Kyle Soller’s Tesman is younger and more vigorous than usual. But van Hove is over-insistent. Music plays at crucial moments: Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Worse: notes on the piano underscore some of the dialogue, running not only underneath whole lines but (plink) between (plink) individual (plink) words.
There are some puzzles, too, in the updating. A video intercom is used very effectively, with faces swimming into the room like ghosts. But why is the photo album not an iPad? Where are the mobile phones? There is, though, no such difficulty in playwright Patrick Marber’s fleet new script. At a stroke he brushes up the lascivious insinuations of Judge Brack: Rafe Spall gleams and bullies effectively. “I shall occupy her fully,” he gloats. It is a version that will have a life beyond this production.
