HEDDA GABLER. To 1 March.
London.
HEDDA GABLER
by Henrik Ibsen.
Barbican Theatre To 1 March 2008.
7.45pm.
Runs 2hr 15min No interval.
TICKETS: 0845 120 7511.
www.barbican.org.uk/bite
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 February.
Vine-leaves all round for the Schaubuhne.
A calm melody plays around a sleek modern property, with its one white interior wall and a glass wall overlooking the garden. But it’s merely a phrase over two endlessly alternating chords. As with the house, or Hedda Tesman’s marriage, superficial attraction soon reveals sterility.
She was Hedda Gabler, the name used by men when they get intimate, leaving the formal “Mrs Tesman” standing-out in the modern setting of Thomas Ostermeier’s Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz Ibsen.
Removing 19-th century costumes and furniture denudes Ibsen’s Norwegian society, but is revelatory. There’s a slim cast too, Judge Brack becoming a young lawyer, fresh as if from a tennis-game. Wafer-thin uber-academic Eilert Lovborg makes the mentally stodgy Tesman seem physically podgy, as Tesman’s notebooks heaped in a corner of the room contrast Lovborg’s laptop. (Later, Hedda smashes this with a hammer, burying it in the garden: something brutally close to the child-murder to which she compares her action.)
Hedda and old-school companion Thea Elvsted, now Lovborg’s loyal acolyte, are small, slim women. Clothes make a big difference. People loll against walls. On .her first visits Thea sticks nervously close to walls, occasionally darting forward as if under fire. Hedda lays along the sofa dominating the room, a creature caught in a glass cage; as an overhead mirror reveals behaviour out of direct sight.
Ostermeier emphasises the lonely hours. Hedda’s first seen in pyjamas at 7.30am. Between acts the stage revolves, projections showing the leafy suburb, then Lovborg living-it up through the night when he dies in a Korean-run brothel.
Ultimately, words give way. Lovborg simulates his forthcoming suicide, cracking his head against the glass which his breath smears as he mimics collapse. Brack’s ultimatum to Hedda is silently mouthed while glass-partitions shut us out, as Tesman and Thea reconstruct Lovborg’s work, pasting his notes on the corridor wall.
As culmination of Ostermeier’s mixed seriousness and (occasionally overplayed) laughter, Hedda’s suicide is thought to be mere play as the others work on. As the set swirls, a fateful carousel, the desperate housewife slumps unseen below her lover’s work, splattered with blood on the wall.
Jorgen Tesman: Lars Eidinger.
Hedda Tesman: Katharina Schnuttler.
Juliane Tesman: Lore Stefanek.
Mrs Elvsted: Annedore Bauer.
Judge Brack: Jorg Hartmann.
Eilert Lovborg: Kay Bartholomaus Schulze.
Director: Thomas Ostermeier.
Designer: Jan Pappelbaum.
Lighting: Erich Schneider.
Music: Malte Beckenbach.
Video: Sebastien Dupouey.
Costume: Nina Wetzel.
Dramaturgy: Marius von Mayenburg.
2008-02-28 18:10:38