Hedda Gabler – The Oxford Playhouse

Writer: Henrik Ibsen

Translator: Michael Meyer

Director: Adrian Noble

Reviewer: Mary Tapper

The Public Reviews Rating:

How fast can Hedda gabble? The play tells the story of Hedda Gabler, who Ibsen named deliberately by her maiden name as she was “her father’s daughter rather than her husband’s wife”. Hedda has married a man she does not love and the play starts as she returns from a 6-month honeymoon that seems to have evolved into a research trip for her academic husband. In their absence his main rival has pulled himself up by the bootstraps (and with the help of a good woman) and published one book, with a masterpiece to come. He is now a treat to Hedda’s husband, Tesman , and indirectly to Hedda, who has presumed that her husband will be well respected in society. The play moves inexorably towards tragedy with Hedda at the centre of all the action.

Rosamund Pike plays Hedda in quite an understated manner but rushes through the dialogue like she has a last train home to catch afterwards! With the rest of the cast keeping up the same frantic pace the whole production takes on a very rushed feel, with no one using much inflection during speeches and announcements of death made in the same way one would have announced tea was on the table! Occasional pauses seemed overlong in this frantic “runaway train” of a production so seemed forced and made the whole thing disjointed.

Hedda did not really exude menace or demand pity, leaving us confused as an audience. Her main motivation seemed to be boredom and her defining character trait spite, so, when the final scene arrives, it is difficult to care.

Tesman, Hedda’s husband, is played by Robert Glenister, but seems slightly miscast. He is scripted as a rather boring academic who would not stand a chance in politics but here seems rather charming and has quite expansive body language- certainly not the mummy’s boy that appears on the page.

Loveborg, rival to Tesman, played by Colin Tierney, lacks sexual chemistry with Pike and, when he leans in to her, looks rather like a creep asking to be swatted away.

Pike seems to act best in her gung-ho scenes with the Judge, Tim McInnerny, but you are left wondering why Gabler would be aghast at the notion of adding excitement to her life by having an affair with him, again shooting holes in the motivations of characters within the play!

The set was disappointing. Walls were painted bright red and ended half way up the stage. Furniture was scattered around the room to denote 3 different rooms but this did not always work well. Between scenes the curtain was lowered and shapes moved behind the curtains with flashlights to change a piece or two around. The first time this happened the auditorium lights were slightly raised and a few of the audience thought it was the interval and tried to leave. In other breaks we had uncomfortable silence with music eventually arriving…poor.

Lighting was basic and rather crude…. blinds were opened off stage and suddenly light flooded the stage, the wood burner was opened and an orange light was turned on. Subtlety was not the name of the game.

Best performances of the night came from Anna Carteret as Aunt Ju-Ju and Janet Whitesaid as Bertha.

This was a production badly in need of clear direction and therefore ultimately unsatisfying. I think if Ibsen himself had been there he might have been tempted to use one of those pistols!