National Theatre Live in HD: "Hedda Gabler"
Old rivals, rekindled jealousies, lost manuscripts and a troubled marriage collide violently in Ibsen’s masterful drama.
“I’ve no talent for life,” says Hedda Gabler. Just married. Buried alive. She longs to be free...
Hedda and Tesman have just returned from their honeymoon and the relationship is already in trouble. Trapped but determined, Hedda tries to control those around her, only to see her own world unravel. Tony Award-winning director Ivo van Hove (A View from the Bridge) brings to the National Henrik Ibsen’s masterful drama, in which old rivals, rekindled jealousies, lost manuscripts and a trouble marriage collide, with disastrous consequences. 3h 30m
Time Out praises the fresh new
interpretation of this classic play:
Starring an incandescent Ruth Wilson, Ivo van Hove’s modern production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler rejects the usual, comforting, proto-feminist reading wherein its heroine does the terrible things she does because she is a victim. Here, Wilson’s Hedda is rarely oppressed by men per se. Certainly you can sympathize with her boredom at affable lecturer husband George Tesman, and even her annoyance that her former wild-child lover has sobered up and written a brilliant thesis.
But the scale of her reprisal is difficult to see as reasonable or justified. And yet—in this year of all years—it’s at least familiar. This Hedda destroys not because she is a woman or oppressed, but because she feels alienated by the smug academics and their dry certainties. She wants to take back control.
