When Moya O’Connell’s Hedda Gabler shakes hands with Judge Brack, she does so deliberately and ambiguously at arm’s length. Is this to show her assumed superiority, her distaste, or her fear? When, with Hedda and Brack sitting side by side, he places his hand upon hers, she withdraws it immediately and buries it decisively under her thigh. With any intimate gesture from her husband, she goes beyond physical expression of revulsion into a palpable and more condemning indifference. When she does reach out physically to the world, she embraces Thea with an artificial and hypocritical concern that seems more like a predatory hunger for a prey. Or she constantly pulls Thea’s hair, as she did when they were at school together, as if to make contact with others by giving them pain. Her physical aggression seems almost physically insane, as if, when out of control, she is made of pure menace. And twice Hedda sticks out her tongue in delight, once when declaring Brack as middle class and once when sensing an opportunity for drama in the works.
Yet for all this controlling choreography to outmaneuver others, this Hedda does not have physical control over her fate. For a woman who declares, “I loathe illness and death, it’s so ugly,” she now finds that her body has a way of its own as, pregnant, she hides herself and throws up. For a woman who moves in close, face to face and almost mouth to mouth, she does so not for intimacy but as an act of defiance and almost repugnance of her own physical self in a world of other physical beings. No, we can’t imagine Hedda with “the same person night after night” and, in her state of building inner tension, she can only hurl pillows in every direction and let out a not always stifled scream. But she cannot escape her inner world, she cannot get back at her outer world in which she is reduced to bullying an elderly maid. Hedda is made of pure frustration that does not, cannot, know what it wants. Meanwhile she is full of inbred snobbery about social class and she fears scandal of any kind that, for one, would compromise her independence.
One observes a great deal about Ibsen’s famous creation and still one cannot claim knowledge of her. Like the arbitrariness of nature, she is because she is. She expects to get her own way, she wants curtains drawn to block out any sunlight, she condescendingly dismisses her husband’s sentimentality about his slippers, she hates flowers, she eschews human contact and artificial niceties of social intercourse. She is inherently dismissive, judgmental, and disapproving in manner. Her smile seems a weapon of attack, her expressions of concern seem a tactic of delay before regrouping her forces to do damage again. She has needed for nothing in her life, except for meaning and purpose, and in Moya O’Connell’s riveting performance, Hedda creates inescapable tension for all who witness her presence, and that includes the audience of this production.
With Richard Eyre’s sharp and revealing new version, O’Connell’s -and director Martha Henry’s- Hedda is a study in human breaking points, delayed but intensifying moment by moment. “I get these feelings and I can’t stop” she declares. “You’ve never been engaged by anything,” observes Judge Brack. So she cannot help but deliberately demonstrate how she despises her husband’s esoteric field of study, perhaps to verify she exists. When George condemns her burning of Lovborg’s manuscript, we see her vulnerability and, in one of O’Connell’s haunting expressions, her dread of losing control of any outcome. “I did it for you,” she counters, and when her husband is moved by such definitive proof of her apparent love, she laughs at the absurdity of the ease by which her deception has convinced the love-starved George. Hedda does not understand kindness at all, even if it might be self-serving, when Aunt Juliana declares, “I need someone to look after.” If this Hedda is seeking meaning, she has no idea of what meaning might be and so she seeks distraction, although distraction always lets her down.
But all the insightfully directed and concisely-realized performances in this unrelentingly gripping production stand out. Patrick McManus’s annoying but touching Tesman is fussy in manner, a one track academic mind that that revels in the obscure. He is constantly driven to please his treasured wife, a catch in the opinion of some, but since he’s a man who knows life through books, one wonders who it is he cares for. Hedda is difficult to understand, but Tesman doesn’t even know he might try to do so, so he fawns on her and his tormented wife remains unknown to him. He is an unimaginative and uninspired man, one unable to see the world as more than he thinks it should be. Still, he seems always busy, always in a hurry, albeit a man of sincere passion in his studies. “You were concerned about me?” he asks Hedda. “No, it would never have occurred to me,” she responds, and there’s nothing in the man that will comprehend the woman revealed in her answer. Or is there? In Henry’s bravely ambiguous study of human reality, do we really comprehend him?
Gray Powell’s compellingly unpredictable Lovborg, on the other hand, is intriguing because, while aware of human values, he also knows he must play the social games of his society and is thus realistic. He wrote his first book, he explains, “to make himself accepted”. He seems volatile with intensity and suggests deeply cut pain and hard realizations in his past, but he remains impulsive and drawn to Hedda who, he says, “wanted to really be alive.” He seems somewhat naïve, maybe decent, yet open to Hedda’s will. Does he know that Hedda’s being really alive might mean own his destruction. Or hers? Under Henry’s guidance this is an interpretation of Ibsen with no black and white answers, only pulsating areas of grey.
Meanwhile, Jim Mezon’s Judge Brack is a man of dominating presence in his every word and gesture. On the prowl for Hedda, he plays polite predatory games and like Hedda is a master of sexual innuendo. As they verbally duel, she reveals her weak points of defense as he meticulously sizes her up as one to conquer. One senses his increasing, perhaps obsessive, hots for Hedda, the blend of his lust and his need to conquer for no reason, both of which are nicely put in his declaration that, unlike her ineffective husband, he is “without an atom of the academic about him”. Brack conquers slowly, discreetly and patiently, and his declaration about Lovborg that “He didn’t shoot himself deliberately” is both bemused and triumphant for he knows, by cracking her last resort of fantasy, that he has her in his grip. Hedda, shortly after, declares, I’m in your power then forever….I won’t be free….you’ll own me.” Thus she sets up one of the most famous of endings in theatre, one that we already know and expect, but for which we are unready.
The other women in the play are conceived and realized with an equally sharp razor’s edge of insight. Claire Julien’s Thea is a deeply sad woman of worn out eyes and nervous erratic movements that suggest increasing inner confusion and pain. She seems a woman of pummeled decency, one whose value has never been acknowledged, and she appears naïve about the motives of others. Or perhaps she acknowledges these motives, as with Hedda’s hair-pulling, but opts for another route. Through Julien’s performance, we see that Thea needs to believe in something or someone like Lovborg with whom she finds her own value and purpose as they work together. But she inspires tension with her desperate concern and, as with Hedda, one thinks she might snap at any moment.
As Aunt Juliana, Mary Haney demonstrates how one might spill blood through polite conversation, even with the manipulative Hedda. Gowned brownish, neck to foot, Juliana speaks with a mature and informed concern to Tesman and retorts to Hedda’s nasty power games with self-contained authority, poise, and a critical edge to her manner. She proves an equally nasty match for the always self-reverential Hedda and goes feisty and cruel as she stresses the younger woman’s unwanted and dreaded pregnancy. Haney implies many dimensions of character in Juliana. Finally, as servant Berthe, Jennifer Phipps has the old lady struggling for breath, perhaps for life, as she is abused by Hedda and seems a metaphor for all the others who can hardly breathe to save themselves in a world Ibsen has observed and created.
This production is unmerciful and outstanding, and several scenes especially come to mind. When Tesman announces to his wife that his coveted and anticipated academic position will now be open to competition, she is now without assurance of her security, one that includes “a certain style” with a butler and a horse. She quietly says, “I see” and it seems that she will quietly go mad with these two words. One senses a quiet frenzy at play in her mind and when she remarks, “At least I have my guns” one wonders what extent her destructive nature will take in its frustration. Later, having again made her reference to “vine leaves in his hair,” she declares “I don’t believe any more” and her expression seems one of a desperate wound that will never find healing. It seems now that nothing matters and, worse perhaps, that nothing ever did.
After all this unrelenting tension and after Hedda has taken the ultimate route of freedom and after Brack has declared that “People don’t do things like that,” the Judge now exits gingerly on tiptoe, as if to escape the anticipated scandal which will now, through his presence at this scene, implicate him. He seems a naughty schoolboy, no longer a systematic tormentor but an imminent victim of a society in which he found position and power and security of mind. The judge who judged others like Lovborg is now trapped in his own once protective society and, in trying to escape the deeds that have made him, is absurd. In ending her own life, Hedda has effectively ended Brack’s and what he was no longer matters. Only great playwrights like Ibsen can negotiate such of life’s supreme ironies in their creations and only uncompromising productions like this one can make a play’s issues an undeniable truth of those of us who watch.