[star rating=”5″]
HEDDA GABLER. Directed by Ivo van Hove. With Ruth Wilson, Rafe Spall and Chukwudi Iwuji.
REVIEW: Megan Furniss
Hedda Gabler is the latest National Theatre production to be ‘live’ broadcast, with limited screenings at Cinema Nouveau. I am searching for the words to describe this play, because I am still shattered by the experience.
Hedda Gabler is one of Ibsen’s most famous plays, and it is probably the one that has managed to stay achingly relevant in the 21st century. This is a new version by Patrick Marber, and the production has been given an incredibly successful contemporary vision by director Ivo van Hove. Ruth Wilson (famous for her TV roles in Luther and The Affair) stars as Hedda Gabler and she is joined on stage by six brilliant actors who bring this production to its hideous conclusion.
The plotline feels like an episode of a soap opera gone horribly wrong. Hedda and her husband return from their honeymoon already deeply at odds with each other, and Hedda, who feels trapped and desperate at the hideous tediousness of her life, and the dreariness of her choices, manipulates those around her in a dangerous and selfish game, that is the cause of her own undoing.
Deeply unsettling set
The ugly set; the bare, unfinished walls of a box, a dirty couch on the on the very far stage left, a piano in the centre, an odd chair and table with a lamp, is deeply unsettling. The strange sliding doors and their vertical blinds on stage right are reminiscent of an office. Containers of flowers are bunched up on the floor.
When the audience enters Hedda is on stage at the piano. There is only this space. In the opening scene, between the maid and Hedda’s husband’s aunt, they take no notice of her. The maid sits on stage too, always, watching, until she needs to do something, like put a suitcase into a cupboard-like aperture in the wall, or answer the door. The aperture becomes a fridge later. The set is dissonant. Is this ugly space a loft apartment in the process of being renovated without a plan, or is it falling into disuse?
Ruth Wilson embodies the unlikable, cruel, selfish, broken, complicated and totally isolated Hedda. She moves like a snake, a tiger, a bird. She is mesmerising, repulsive and alluring. All the performances are heightened and big; not naturalistic or filmic but intensely, horrifyingly theatrical. The people break the space and are in turn broken by it.
It is Hedda’s unravelling, punctuated by strange scene changes with Joni Mitchell’s Blue, bizarre lighting, and Ruth Wilson’s audible breathing, that add to this heart-break and keep it relentless.
It’s like watching a head-on collision in slow motion; fascinating, horrific, inevitable.
Pure theatre
This is pure theatre; almost three hours of it. I left the movie theatre in an altered state. I am forever changed by this production of Hedda Gabler and am grateful for the opportunity to see this kind of work. It raises the stakes of the kind of thing we can expect to see on stage. This work is unapologetic, challenging, painful and extraordinary. I dare you to see it.
What: Hedda Gabler
Where: Cinema Nouveau
When: 1, 5 and 6 April at 7.30pm and 2 April at 2.30pm
Book: Ster-Kinekor website (www.sterkinekor.com) or the SK App. Also at the cinema box office or via TicketLine on 0861 MOVIES (668 437)
WS
