The fashion for Hedda Gabler in recent years has been to impose what might be termed the anti-aspidistra approach, as directors including Ivo van Hove, Thomas Ostermeier and Carrie Cracknell have sought to transpose Hedda from an unhappily married 19th-century general’s daughter into a throughly modern, neurotic wreck.
So it initially comes as a bit of a surprise to find a Hedda who is conventionally corseted-up, though director/adapter Selma Dimitrijevic’s approach veers some way from traditional, Ibsenite realism. To fully understand it, the piece really needs to be seen in context as part of Northern Stage-Greyscale’s Queens of the North season, which doubles the same cast, and the imposing basilisks of Tom Piper’s scenery, with a radical rereading of Frankenstein.
In Dimitrijevic’s version of Mary Shelley’s tale, Dr Victoria Frankenstein seeks scientific enlightenment as a means of escaping the obligations of a woman’s place in society. Her adaptation of Ibsen shows Hedda to be similarly constrained, though rather than reanimating body parts, she subjects those around her to a manipulative thought-experiment whose destructive impulse seems to be the expression of a disintegrating mind. From her first appearance, Victoria Elliott’s Hedda appears distracted, newly returned from a stultifying honeymoon which her husband Tesman spent collecting data for his academic treatise on Dutch cottage industries. “I know everything there is to know about thatched roofs and wattle and daub,” she spits, with the malicious undercurrent of one who would burn every Dutch cottage to the ground given half an opportunity.
Elliott shows a keen response to the character’s absurdity, particularly the manner in which she floats the outlandish proposal of pressing her ineffectual husband into politics. “Do you think you could see Tesman as prime minister?” she posits, though the fustian academic is played with such booby-ish self-absorption by Ed Gaughan it would be like Lady Macbeth backing Mr Casaubon to become king of Scotland. And there’s an alarmingly unhinged moment when she mounts the table for a spot of live target practice with her dead father’s pistols.
It’s a performance that arguably does not need Dimitrijevic’s most intrusive interpretative trope, which is to freeze the action whenever the red mist descends, isolating Hedda in a pool of light and expressing her rage in increasingly histrionic fashion. Though jarring in effect, it diminishes the overall impact of the play if the other characters become mere accessories to Hedda’s psychodrama. And the concept is in severe danger of overplaying its hand with a metatextual sequence following Hedda’s suicide, in which Elliott tears off her corset and fires several further rounds into the abandoned costume on the floor.
One can appreciate the symbolism that from a suffocating chrysalis of whalebone, a modern woman has been born. Yet it is gesture symptomatic of a trigger-happy production that ultimately succeeds only in shooting itself in the foot.
- In rep at Northern Stage, Newcastle, until 8 March. Box office: 0191-230 5151.
