Ruth Wilson’s Hedda isn’t scared when someone points a pistol at her. She just leans in until her forehead rests against the barrel. Can you blame her? Wilson is stuck on stage throughout this ferocious production. There’s nowhere else for her to go.
The set is a vast, white, unfinished apartment: barely any furniture and no doors. People who have things to do come in and out through the auditorium. Hedda, with only her piano and a pair of pistols for distraction, can’t move. No wonder Ibsen’s heroine is as mean as she’s miserable. Wilson brings her terrible rage to scorching life.
That’s Hedda Gabler as was: “proud daughter of a dead general”, she’s now Mrs Tesman, wife of a young academic (special subject: domestic handicrafts in medieval Brabant). They’ve returned from a reportedly glorious honeymoon (it wasn’t) and moved into what is supposedly her dream home (it isn’t). They can’t afford to decorate, but the general’s pistols sit in a case on the wall. Also a fire extinguisher.
Ibsen was over 60 when Hedda Gabler was published in 1890. Biographers note his intense friendships with two younger women while writing it, but surely Hedda’s rage is his own. No zeal burnt more fiercely for Ibsen than the urge to tear everything down. He is the great reformer who pits individuals against corrupt and timorous societies: the wife refuting her doll’s house marriage, the scientist who becomes a public enemy. And he lets them burn, burn, burn it all down. His plays deploy guns, rivers, even an avalanche, to torpedo a compromised life.
In Ivo van Hove’s production, others come and go around Hedda: Tesman and his devoted auntie (Kate Duchêne); the men who used to flock round Hedda, the reformed wastrel Lovborg and the overbearing Brack; Thea (Sinéad Matthews, quietly resolute), who was tormented by Hedda at school, but has helped turn Lovborg’s life around.
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Wilson, eyes glinting, mopes around in slugabed glamour — teetering black heels and an ivory slip, wide mouth painted scarlet. She picks out desultory phrases on the piano that gradually swell sorrowfully on the soundtrack into Joni Mitchell and Nina Simone.
What does Hedda want? Something beautiful, something meaningful. Armfuls of flowers welcome the honeymooners — Hedda eventually hurls blooms over the stage, staples stems to the walls. When it looks as if Tesman’s promotion, and the salary they’ve counted on, might not come through, Hedda sits in zombie shock: “So I don’t get a butler?”
Wilson captures Hedda’s gift for wheedling secrets out of people, but her own desires are a terror and a mystery to her. When a chance to act approaches, she looks scared, almost tearful; when those chances retreat, she’s furious.
Everyone drops crass hints about motherhood, and she’s not having it: “Let. Me. Go.” But her own hand drops to her belly: cruelly confident in company, she looks fearful alone. The only person to spot this is Eva Magyar, also on stage throughout as the maid, Berte. She winces at Hedda’s small cruelties. But, easing out of their heels, the pair share a cigarette and become something like conspirators as Hedda’s options close in on her.
You search for a spark between Wilson and Kyle Soller as her husband, which only flickers when they’re trading naughty gossip. Was this their only bond? It’s not enough. “You need to settle,” Hedda reflects. “I settled for him.”
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Her chaps can be a stuffy lot, chuntering into middle age, but here they’re all younger and sexier than usual. Soller plays Tesman tousled, loose and funny. Chukwudi Iwuji, as Lovborg, has a gentleness and rare directness — but Hedda toys with his demons and he returns sweaty, bloodied, his voice whittled to a hoarse croon.
Rafe Spall doesn’t downplay the brutishness of Brack. On this wide stage, he gets too close to Hedda, looming bullishly over her. He strolls and manspreads around the apartment as if he owned the oxygen.
Although the piece looks and sounds contemporary, van Hove and his designer, Jan Versweyveld, keep it just abstract enough to pre-empt cavils. (Bloody hell, Hedda, get a job; oh, Lovborg, just Dropbox your precious manuscript.) He previously produced the play in Amsterdam and New York, with a Christopher Hampton text; this pithy version is by Patrick Marber, its edge honed by sarcasm.
Van Hove has made his Toneelgroep Amsterdam the most vital international company, but some of his English-language ventures have damp-squibbed: Juliette Binoche as Antigone, David Bowie’s musical Lazarus. In tightly formed melodrama, however, such as Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, he’s inescapable. Those old plays creep up behind you and press a forearm over the windpipe. Your heart races. You can’t move.
Hedda Gabler
Lyttelton, National, London SE1 ★★★★