The role of a reviewer, John McCallum has
said (quoting Katherine Brisbane), is to articulate why a team of people have
spent upwards of six months of their lives bringing this play (or this version
of a play) to the stage, and communicate it to an audience. Additionally, the
role of a reviewer is to comment on a production, on its strengths and
weaknesses, to review a production in all its nuances. I write reviews because
I find it the most effective way to record my thoughts about a production and
because, as John McCallum so eloquently said in his Philip
Parson’s speech in 2010, I’ve been “theatre-fucked” and I want to share
the experience with others, encourage them to be “theatre-fucked” too. Favourable
reviews are only written when a production deserves it (you can find a
selection of them on this site) and they are always a challenge because you
can’t say everything; your average review is the most common, but is no less
easy or hard for being so – the bad things mustn’t outweigh the good, but the
good things can soften the bad. Unfavourable reviews are perhaps the hardest to
write because of the time investment that Brisbane-via-McCallum
*
It may surprise you then, to know this is
the first production of Hedda Gabler
that I’ve seen on the stage. Granted, I’ve read the readily available
translation of the play twice, read Andrew
Upton’s exquisitely rendered 2004 adaptation for the Sydney Theatre Company
half a dozen times, and seen the documentary In the Company of
Actors about the same production another half-dozen times. I know the
play, what it is capable of, but to see Belvoir’s latest
offering, in Adena Jacobs’ adaptation of Ibsen’s play, is to watch your
dreams dashed upon the rocks, squashed under the heel of a boot, crushed before
they’d had a chance to grow wings.
The first thing we see in the dimly-lit
Belvoir corner is a shiny stately black car, a room with large glass windows,
and a small square swimming pool; Hedda lies in a black swimsuit on the pool’s
edge, and it’s very clear where the design and directorial influences are drawn
from. As soon as the lights brighten and the play begins properly, it becomes
very clear very quickly this is not Ibsen’s play. At least, not as he wrote it.
It’s another case of Belvoir’s evasive
marketing strategy, whereby productions are marketed as the classic play when
they are really rewrites or radical adaptations which bear allegiance in
character names and loose plot structures only. If you’ve seen any of Simon
Stone’s productions in Sydney
Ibsen’s play is set in the late nineteenth
century, in an age when the predominant social and cultural climate was one of
examining a woman’s role, her agency and independence; it was the era of the
suffragette movement, of the exploration of an individual’s independence and
their right to choose their own life; the age of Ibsen, Chekhov, George Bernard
Shaw. Part of the allure of plays like Hedda
Gabler and A
Doll’s House, of The
Cherry Orchard and The
Three Sisters, of Pygmalion,
Man
and Superman and Mrs
Warren’s Profession, is how their characters (and writers) negotiate
the socio-cultural constraints of the time and how they ultimately transcend
them, choosing their own endings. Hedda, a rich general’s daughter, recently
married to Jorgen Tesman, a scholar, does not want to be defined by someone
else, does not want to be someone’s daughter or wife, but rather her own
person, and so takes the only way out she can find. In Jacobs’ Directors notes,
she says how her thoughts kept returning to America
in her conceptualisation of this production, of what America
“represents for the contemporary Western world, as Athens Hollywood billboard… A fantasy of beauty
mingled with destruction.” Be that as it may, but when you take characters and,
indeed, the play out of its late nineteenth century context, you’d better have
a very good reason for doing so. Otherwise Hedda turns into a bored rich woman,
born into privilege, a woman who has known no true hardship nor struggle, who
doesn’t really want for anything, who has no real reason to escape. She could,
as Jacobs continues, “at any moment… get up and leave [so] why doesn’t she?” She
is bored, watching her is boring, and the production instantly becomes devoid
of any kind of dramatic tension; the climax is ruined instantly, well before
you get there ninety minutes later, and there is no chance of rescue.
We are drawn to Ibsen’s Hedda, the
character, just as much as we are to the play, because of the stifling sense of
claustrophobia we feel, because of the sense of claustrophobia we share with
her, and which we want to alleviate and share the burden of. Watching Ash
Flanders (who has made a career out of performing strong iron-willed women for Sisters
Grimm, his company with Declan Greene) as Hedda, I repeatedly asked myself
why he was cast in place of a woman, what did his playing of the role bring to
the production? And I still have no answer, days later. Instead of a stifling
claustrophobia, we got near-nudity, a costume that barely deviates from the
black swimsuit of the opening scene, wigs that were worn for a minute before
being discarded, entire scenes played out wearing nothing more than a fur coat…
At one point, Flanders’ Hedda sits in front of a flat-screen television playing
an x-box; I’m still trying to work out whether it was a stylistic choice, a
seemingly-clever analogy to show how much she liked playing with her father’s
pistols (and that is not a euphemism), or just a directorial choice to show how
bored she was. Either way, whatever was happening on the television screen was
more interesting than what was happening on stage, and that is not a good
thing. After the Broadway premiere of Hedda
in 1902, one reviewer wrote of Hedda – “degenerate, selfish, morbid, cruel,
bitter, jealous, something of a visionary, something of a lunatic.” In Jacobs’
production, we get selfish, morbid, cruel, bitter and jealous, definitely, more
than ‘something’ of a lunatic, and also a weird alienating sense of voyeurism,
of wealth and the apathetic lack of aliveness it can bring; a woman who will
think nothing of burning a friend’s hair or manuscript, nothing of locking a
friend and neighbour in the car overnight (in a very literal reading of the
action).
The rest of the cast try valiantly to
climb out of this apparently ‘post-gendered’ production’s sinkhole and, for the
most part, succeed. Lynette Curran as Aunt Julie brings a genteel English
warmth to what could have become a cousin to her clownish Big Mama in Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof. Oscar Redding’s Lovborg, whilst a caricature of a
person, brought a desperation to his performance and we realised just how
tortured a character he is, plagued by his own insecurities and self-doubts,
his dependence on other people for success and well-being, and how quickly and
cruelly that can all be undermined by someone like Flanders’ Hedda. Tim
Walter’s Tesman seemed to drift in and out of scenes, more often that not in
running clothes, though his final scene with Hedda in the car brought out just
how giving he could have been, had Jacobs allowed him more room. Branden
Christine as Berte, the maid, was underused and seemed to be part stage-hand,
clearing flowers and boxes away, clearing up after other characters had
discarded their clothes or belongings on the stage and moved on with their sad
and interminable lives. (Also, if I see another person strip down to their
underwear on Belvoir’s stage any time this year, I might just scream.) Marcus
Graham’s Brack brought a loose warmth and charisma to a limply updated role,
and ensured that we really did feel like there could be something of a triangle
between he, Hedda and Tesman. Anna Houston as Thea had all the bearing, the
restraint, the poise and coldness that Hedda could’ve had, and seemed miscast
as Hedda’s old schoolmate-cum-neighbour.
Here’s the thing with Jacobs’ production:
at one point, Lovborg calls Thea an idiot and Hedda a coward, and his words are
echoed minutes later by another character; Berte is chastised and threatened
with dismissal because she left a soft drink can on the bonnet of Hedda’s car.
It seems women, in Jacobs’ version – and vision – of Ibsen’s play, serve no
other function than to be ciphers, the subject of a man’s whim and desire, to
be there when needed and then discarded, tossed aside like a manuscript in the
middle of the road, to be collected and burnt out of spite and jealousy. Is
this really where we want to be in the twenty-first century? Have we really
come so far from the nineteenth century world that Ibsen was writing in, that
the play is set in, to be calling and depicting women as idiots and cowards for
wanting to be their own person? Are we really vilifying women for daring to
speak their mind, the truth as they see it? It’s not a recent phenomenon either,
not just something that’s just appeared with this production, but something
that has been bubbling around Sydney
With regards to the physical production elements – the
set, costumes, lighting, sound – the influences are only too obvious, and in
the same space too. Just as Simon Stone has seemingly begat Adena Jacobs’
directorial style, so too has he blatantly influenced her design choices, most
noticeably in the use of a car on the stage (Death
of a Salesman, 2012) and dim pools of crepuscular lighting used to
create seemingly disparate spaces (Hamlet,
2013). The car seems forced, contrived, unnecessary, especially when Hedda
locks Thea in there overnight and tosses the keys into the swimming pool
(itself perhaps a nod to Benedict Andrews’ Every
Breath). There is nothing to make Hedda and Tesman’s new house stand
out from the blackness of the stage, nothing to set it apart and make it seem
like an ideal place to live. Consisting of a series of glass windows on what
was essentially a corridor, the room ended in a study-cum-wardrobe with a small
portrait-sized window facing the audience. Like Benedict Andrews’ Seagull in 2011, it effectively
alienated a full third of the audience, and prevented them from seeing what was
happening at several times during the play’s languorous ninety-minute running
time. Flanders’ frequent (and pointless) costume changes added nothing to the
character, the performing of her, or Jacobs’ staging, apart from foregrounding
just how bored a person she is, ‘trapped’ in her world. David Fleischer’s
costumes, normally carefully tailored to the world of the production (see Mojo
or Romeo
and Juliet for just two examples) were here bland and uninspired, with
Thea’s costume perhaps being closest to Ibsen’s imagined world; his costumes
for the finale, a plain and sombre black palette in various styles, blended
with Dayna Morrissey’s bland set (with black curtains turning the windows into
obsidian mirrors, reflecting the audience back at themselves; Morrissey’s black
set seems to be the mirror opposite of the one she created for Jacobs’ staging
of Bergman’s Persona
at Belvoir last year). Danny Pettingill’s lighting is, for the most part,
effective, though there are some peculiar choices – like the lights in the
grille of the car which light in time to the music at the end of the play, or Hedda’s
death-glow. Similarly, Kelly Ryall’s music sounded here like
electronica-infused glam-punk, and did not fit the glamorous Hollywood
world created by Jacobs and her team. Played primarily in scene-changes (or
act-changes, to be more precise), Ryall’s music plays for too long, just as the
blackouts run almost a full five minutes at their longest; they disrupt the
already jagged flow of the production and make you eager for that inevitable gunshot,
the one you know is coming, even if you haven’t seen or read the play before.
Which brings us to that inevitable gunshot, the
conclusion of this review which you know has been coming. After one of Jacobs’
unendurable blackouts – in which Hedda sits alone at the wheel of the car, and
stares into the oblivion of downstage; while the lights in the grille of the
car flash in time with the music; in which our patience is sorely tested –
Hedda dons her long auburn wig, climbs out of the window of the car and onto
its roof. After a beat, she proceeds to unclasp her dress, shrugs one arm out
of the sleeve, then the other, rolls the dress down around her waist, unclasps
a revolver that’s been concealed on her side, and holds it to her temple. After
maintaining her steely gaze for another beat, she fires – finally!; as she
falls backwards, caught in a slow-motion limbo, weightless, between sitting and
lying crumpled on the car’s roof, she is hit with an eerie green glow, making
her look like a pale lifeless zombie. She lies there, unmoving, and Berte, the
maid, dressed in black mourning clothes, enters and walks closer to the car,
backlit by a hazy golden light, before it too fades into the blackout.
I don’t know what Jacobs was hoping to achieve by
casting Ash Flanders as Ibsen’s Hedda; despite her assurances in the program
that it will become clear, that the “production [will] speak for itself,” I am
still wondering why Flanders was cast, days later. Why couldn’t a female actor
play Hedda? Is it that Flanders was somehow
‘better’ than any woman? Is his performance of a woman more womanly than
anything a woman could perform? Does he somehow understand women better than
women do themselves? Or is the whole performing gender thing part of the issue
here – Hedda feels trapped in a predominantly male world, thereby a man playing
a woman’s role somehow feels appropriate? Jacobs writes that Hedda’s “‘dream
home’ [is] both a zoo and marketplace, where one’s identity becomes the most
prized possession.” Here, though, you are only all too acutely aware of Ash
Flanders performing Hedda (unlike, say, Felicity Huffman’s performance in Transamerica, where the
boundaries of gender blur irrevocably in the opening scenes) and this
performative aspect only foregrounds the distinctly “unfeminine” actions Cathy
Hunt discusses in her ‘On Hedda Gabler’ essay in the program. The issue here, I
think, goes deeper than merely performing a role, or performing gender, and
questions the validity of a woman’s performance or a woman’s ability to perform
such a role, either believably or at all. While Jacobs’ intention might have
been to problematise and break down the perceived boundaries of gender, of
gendered performances, of performances of gender, I don’t think it works
anywhere nearly as well or effectively as it could have. Hunt cites Judith
Butler and Simone de Beauvoir as key theorists in this regard, and says how
both saw gender as an unnatural and constructed situation which is comprised of
actions “functioning as statements which ‘congeal over time to produce the
substance of a natural sort of being.’” Hedda is a strong character and, in
theory, the gender (and/or sex) of the actor who plays her should not really
matter as much as it does. What I take issue with is when directors, theorists,
commentators &c claim that someone is somehow better suited to the role
than any other simply because they ‘play’ tragic heroines better, or that their
performances are ‘more truthful,’ whatever that means. Yes, Flanders’ creative
practice as an actor might allow him “deep identification with difference and
duality through his [particular] embodiment of this contested character,” but I
don’t think that it should be stated or inferred that he is somehow better than
anyone else at ‘being’ or ‘performing’ a woman.
*
We were promised a “primal close-up of Ibsen’s
electrifying marriage tragedy,” but instead got a languid, bitter, overly
cynical, cruel and apathetic Hedda,
garbled in adaptation, and not really what we were promised at all. I miss the
period setting, the corsets and dresses, the coats and canes, boots and
jackets; I miss the aching need to break free from the cage Hedda finds herself
in and to leave, to walk out that door in whatever way she can. I miss Hedda
Gabler, the character, the woman; I miss Ibsen’s play, I miss the very real
sense of claustrophobia you get from seeing someone in a corset and long dress,
physically restricted by the clothes they wear, the conventions that make them
dress that way. I miss what Hedda is
capable of, what I know she can be.
In short, I
miss Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and I want
her back.
Theatre playlist: 31. Heads Will Roll, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Wow! Great Review! Nailed everything that was wrong with this piece and absolutely agreed with all observations regarding Jacobs' assertion that Flanders could somehow play this woman better. Loved all of it, will come back for more.
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