a blog by Peter Leonard
Stockholms Stadsteater premiered their new production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in April 2007, a performance I just caught this Saturday. The director, Alexander Mørk-Eidem, was previously responsible for Gengångare (Ghosts) in Oslo. His adaptation of this Ibsen play consists mainly of cutting the work down to size -- for example Aunt Juliane, Hedda's unintentional provocateur, exists only as a phone call, never setting foot on stage. With the older generation consigned to the telephone, the stage is given over to a 30-something crowd caught between youthful promise and creeping self-doubt. As Mørk-Eidem says,
The scenography is minimalist, evoking a late-mid-century modern style with improbably long leather couches on the stage (sourced from Kulturhuset itself) and an ironic retro soundtrack emanating from a record player.
Helena af Sandeberg portrays Hedda with all the congenital impatience and dangerous boredom the role demands. As her newlywed husband, Andreas Kundler has a harder job: how to portray a tedious academic whose only flash of personality comes when he has the chance to destroy a scholarly rival's masterwork. That rival, Magnus Krepper as Eilert Løvborg, delivers one of the more convincing performances as an unstable genius teetering between triumph and ruin. Krupper's acting is matched only by Gerhard Hoberstorfer's portrayal of Brack, the seemingly-upstanding lawyer whose loans finance the tottering Tesman household, and whose moral balance eventually proves too odious for even Hedda herself to bear.
The culmination of Ibsen's play, and the reaction it usually provokes, is by now no surprise to most of the public, but the staging of Hedda's fate in this performance deserves credit for its visceral and grotesque imagery. The anti-heroine's suicide (in full view of everyone, contrary to Ibsen's original staging) leaves the other actors -- as well as the notes for Løvborg's academic masterpiece -- splattered with the former contents of her head. Ibsen's original final line, a repetition of Brack's "Sligt noget gør man da ikke!" (One doesn't do such things!") is absent in this production, but written on the blood-stained faces of those left alive on stage.
Reviews: Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet.