| Hedda Gabler | |
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title page of the 1890 text |
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| Written by | Henrik Ibsen |
| Date premiered | 1891 |
| Place premiered | Königliches Residenz-Theater Munich, Germany |
| Original language | Norwegian |
| Subject | a newlywed struggles with an existence she finds devoid of excitement and enchantment |
| Genre | Drama |
| Setting | Jørgen Tesman's villa, Kristiania, Norway; 1890s |
| IBDB profile | |
Hedda Gabler is a play first published in 1890 by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The play premiered in 1891 in Germany to negative reviews, but has subsequently gained recognition as a classic of realism, nineteenth century theatre, and world drama. A 1902 production was a major sensation on Broadway starring Minnie Maddern Fiske and following its initial limited run was revived with the actress the following year.
The character of Hedda is considered by some critics as one of the great dramatic roles in theatre, the "female Hamlet," and some portrayals have been very controversial.[1] Depending on the interpretation, Hedda may be portrayed as an idealistic heroine fighting society, a victim of circumstance, a prototypical feminist, or a manipulative villain.
Hedda's married name is Hedda Tesman; Gabler is her maiden name. On the subject of the title, Ibsen wrote: "My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than her husband's wife."[2]
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Hedda Gabler, daughter of an aristocratic general, has just returned to her villa in Kristiania (now Oslo) from her honeymoon. Her husband is Jørgen Tesman, an aspiring, young, reliable (but not brilliant) academic who has combined research with their honeymoon. It becomes clear in the course of the play that she has never loved him but has married him for reasons pertaining to the boring nature of her life, and it is suggested that she may be pregnant.
The reappearance of Tesman's academic rival, Ejlert Løvborg, throws their lives into disarray. Løvborg, a writer, is also a recovered alcoholic who has wasted his talent until now. Thanks to a relationship with Hedda's old schoolmate Thea Elvsted (who has left her husband for him), Løvborg shows signs of rehabilitation and has just completed a bestseller in the same field as Tesman.
The critical success of his recently published work transforms Løvborg into a threat to Tesman, as Løvborg becomes a competitor for the university professorship Tesman had been counting on. Tesman and Hedda are financially overstretched, and Tesman tells Hedda that he will not be able to finance the regular entertaining or luxurious housekeeping that Hedda had been expecting. Upon meeting Løvborg, however, the couple discover that he has no intention of competing for the professorship, but rather has spent the last few years labouring with Mrs. Elvsted over what he considers to be his masterpiece, the "sequel" to his recently published work.
Apparently jealous of Mrs. Elvsted's influence over Løvborg, Hedda hopes to come between them. She provokes Løvborg to get drunk and go to a party. Tesman returns home from the party and reveals that he found the manuscript of Løvborg's great work, which the latter has lost while drunk. When Hedda next sees Løvborg, he confesses to her, despairingly, that he has lost the manuscript. Instead of telling him that the manuscript has been found, Hedda encourages him to commit suicide, giving him a pistol. She then burns the manuscript and tells Tesman she has destroyed it to secure their future.
When the news comes that Løvborg has indeed killed himself, Tesman and Mrs. Elvsted are determined to try to reconstruct his book from what they already know. Hedda is shocked to discover from the sinister Judge Brack (a friend of Tesman's), that Løvborg's death, in a brothel, was messy and probably accidental (this "ridiculous and vile" death contrasts with the "beautiful and free" one that Hedda had imagined for him). Worse, Brack knows the origins of the pistol. It is then made clear that Brack acknowledges his power over Hedda. He also tells her that a scandal will likely arise due to her role in giving Løvborg the pistol. Leaving the others, and wanting to escape this inevitable scandal, she goes into her smaller room and shoots herself in the head. The others in the room assume that Hedda is simply firing shots, and they follow the sound to investigate. The play ends with Tesman, Brack, and Mrs. Elvsted discovering her body.
Joseph Wood Krutch makes a connection between Hedda Gabler and Freud, whose first work on psychoanalysis was published almost a decade later. Hedda is one of the first fully developed neurotic female protagonists of literature.[3] By that, Krutch means that Hedda is neither logical nor insane in the old sense of being random and unaccountable. Her aims and her motives have a secret personal logic of their own. She gets what she wants, but what she wants is not anything that the normal usually admit, publicly at least, to be desirable. One of the significant things that such a character implies is the premise that there is a secret, sometimes unconscious, world of aims and methods — one might almost say a secret system of values — that is often much more important than the rational one.
Joan Templeton makes a connection between Hedda Gabler and Hjørdis from The Vikings at Helgeland, since the arms-bearing, horse-riding Hedda, married to a passive man she despises, indeed resembles the "eagle in a cage" that Hjørdis terms herself.[4]
Bernard Paris interprets Hedda's actions as stemming from her "need for freedom [which is] as compensatory as her craving for power... her desire to shape a man's destiny." [5]
The play was written and first performed in Munich at the Königliches Residenz-Theater on 31 January 1891, with Clara Heese as Hedda. The first British performance was at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, on 20 April the same year, starring Elizabeth Robins, who directed it with Marion Lea, who played Thea. Robins also played Hedda in the first US production, which opened on March 30, 1898 at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York City.[6]
Many popular actresses have played the role of Hedda: they include Eleonora Duse, Alla Nazimova, Asta Nielsen, Eva Le Gallienne, Anne Meacham, Ingrid Bergman, Jill Bennett, Janet Suzman, Diana Rigg, Isabelle Huppert, Kate Burton, Kate Mulgrew, Kelly McGillis, Fiona Shaw, Maggie Smith, Annette Bening, Amanda Donohoe, Judy Davis, Erin Berger, Emmanuelle Seigner, Harriet Walter, Rosamund Pike and Cate Blanchett, who won the 2005 Helpmann Award (Australia) for Best Female Actor in a Play. In the early 1970s, Irene Worth played Hedda at Stratford, Ontario, prompting New York Times critic Walter Kerr to write, "Miss Worth is just possibly the best actress in the world." In 2005, a production by Richard Eyre, starring Eve Best, at the Almeida Theatre in London has been well-received, and later transferred for an 11½ week run at the Duke of York's on St Martin's Lane. The play was staged at Chicago's famed Steppenwolf Theater starring actress Martha Plimpton, who is credited with bringing renewed modern interest to the play.
British playwright John Osborne wrote an adaptation in 1972, and in 1991 famed playwright Judith Thompson presented an adaptation at the Shaw Festival. Thompson adapted the play a second time in 2005 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto, setting the first half of the play in the nineteenth century, and the second half during the present day. Early in 2006, the play gained critical success at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds and at the Liverpool Playhouse, directed by Matthew Lloyd with Gillian Kearney in the lead role. A revival opened in January 2009 on Broadway, starring Mary-Louise Parker as the title character and Michael Cerveris as Jørgen Tesman, at the American Airlines Theatre to mixed critical reviews. A modernised New Zealand adaptation by The Wild Duck starring Clare Kerrison in the title role, and opening at BATS Theatre in Wellington in April 2009, was hailed as "extraordinarily accessible without compromising Ibsen's genius at all."[7] Performance of a production of the play was stopped in Tehran, Iran in 2011.[8] Its organizers were summoned to court for inquiry after an Iranian news agency blasted the classic drama in a review and described it as "vulgar" and "hedonistic" with symbols of "sexual slavery cult".[9][10] A Serbian production premiered in February 2011 at the National Theatre in Belgrade[11]
The play has been adapted for screen a number of times, from the silent film era of the early 1910s to the present day in several languages.[12] In 1975, Glenda Jackson was nominated for an Academy Award as leading actress for her role in the British film adaptation Hedda.
Deborah Warner's version, with Fiona Shaw as Hedda Gabler and Stephen Rea as Ejlert Løvborg, was televised in 1993. Shaw's portrayal finds the hypersensitivity behind those cruelties of Hedda's which are often played without conscience. Shaw plays the requisite arrogance with which Hedda wounds those around her, but the immediate recriminations which she visits upon herself are even more harrowing.
An American film version released in 2004 relocated the story to a community of young academics in Washington state.
An operatic adaptation of the play has been produced by Shanghai's Hangzhou XiaoBaiHua Yue Opera House.
An adaptation with a lesbian relationship was staged in Philadelphia in 2009 by Mauckingbird Theatre Company.[13]
A turkey living in Morningside Park, New York City, was named Hedda Gobbler.
A prostitute in the feature film Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is named Hedda Gobbler.
The 2009 album Until the Earth Begins to Part by Scottish folk indie-rock band Broken Records features a song, "If Eilert Løvborg Wrote A Song, It Would Sound Like This".
John Cale, Welsh musician and founder of American rock band The Velvet Underground, recorded a song "Hedda Gabler" in 1976, included originally on the 1977 EP Animal Justice (now a bonus track on the CD of the album Sabotage). He performed the song live in London (5 March 2010) with a band and a 19 piece orchestra in his Paris 1919 tour.
The Norwegian hard-rock band Black Debbath recorded the song "Mötorhedda Gabler" on their Ibsen-inspired album Naar Vi Døde Rocker ("When We Dead Rock").
The original play Heddatron by Elizabeth Meriwether melds Hedda Gabler with a modern family’s search for love despite the invasion of technology into everyday life.
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