Ruth Leon recommends…. Hedda Gabler x 3
Ruth Leon recommendsAn independent-minded woman called Hedda is in the arts news this week with three reimaginings of Ibsen’s 1891 drama, Hedda Gabler, a masterpiece of literary realism.
Henrik Ibsen’s upper-class Hedda is trapped in an unhappy marriage, the prisoner of the boredom and conventions of her time and place. As her frustration rises and her inability to find a satisfying life for herself becomes unbearable, she takes the only way out. Hedda Gabler is one of the greatest of all female roles in theatre. Every successful actress wants a crack at her and most get one at some point in their career.
Hardly surprising, then, that Hedda has become a byword for every frustrated woman in the dramatic literature and is constantly being reinvented as a character in books, movies, and plays in every medium.
Click here to subscribe to the recent National Theatre modern dress version starring Ruth Wilson as Hedda, directed by Ivo van Hove.
Hedda – Amazon Prime video from Nia DaCostacomes a provocative, modern reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play. This contemporary Hedda, Tessa Thompson, finds herself torn between the lingering ache of a past love and the quiet suffocation of her present life.
Over the course of one charged night, long-repressed desires and hidden tensions erupt—pulling her and everyone around her into a spiral of manipulation, passion, and betrayal.
In the live theatre, at The Orange Tree in Richmond near London, is another new Hedda, this one an adaptation by Tanika Gupta and set in 1948. This Hedda is a semi-retired Anglo-Indian movie star (think Merle Oberon), married to a white film writer, whose frustration is born more from racism than boredom. Pearl Chanda plays Hedda in this version.
It is surely a measure of the genius of Henrik Ibsen that his invention of a seemingly conventional woman from another century should have inspired the canvas upon which the hopes and aspirations of so many women of all classes, races and nationalities have been painted in so many colours.
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