Minimalist Theatre at its Most Seductive: Reviewing 'Hedda Gabler'
As you step into the intimate Bread and Roses’ theatre to take your seat, you walk past Hedda Gabler, played by Eliza Cameron, as she drapes herself across the stage’s central white table like a bored house cat. Much like a house cat, Hedda’s domestication cannot tame her. She messes with the furniture, moving the two wooden chairs and the wide table that make up the simple set into unexpected positions along the small stage’s floor. This prelude sets up a tantalising production in which Ibsen’s singular setting stifles the fiery protagonist, stoking the domestic drama that turns deadly by the play’s second half. With this, the stage is set for Mya Kelln’s sleek, minimalist adaptation of Ibsen’s 1891 story about power, desire, and social ruin.
The production opens in the Tesman drawing room, a setting that neither the audience nor Hedda get any respite from during the play. We meet the fussy and unsettled powerhouse that is Cameron’s Hedda Gabler, now called Hedda Tesman, as she returns from her honeymoon with her softly spoken, academic husband, Dr Tesman (Jack Aldridge). As Hedda later reveals to Lövborg, she has “settled” into a marriage with a man whose barren pockets and scholarly conversation cannot entertain her, and thus ensues the two-hour tale of Hedda’s attraction to scandal amid lacklustre domesticity. A spoiled, once bourgeois character with a complicated past, Hedda is at the centre of the social tensions that come to a head upon the return of Ejlert Lövborg. With hints to Hedda and Lövborg’s passionate prior relationship, the play follows the interpersonal dynamics of the seven-person cast as Hedda manipulates the devoted Thea Elvstead, dances a delicate game of power in the “triangle” she finds herself in with Judge Brack, and revisits her complicated past with the troubled Lövborg.
Kelln’s direction is distinct; from the opening scene, the characters alternate with coherent fluidity between facing the audience and one another as they speak their dialogue. It is a subtle choice, but one that sets the tone for a production that is in constant negotiation with the play’s interlocking character dynamics. The opening scene introduces Aunt Julienne (Ellie Stones) and Berta (Charlotte Clements), who discuss Dr Tesman and Hedda’s imminent arrival to the estate. Though in one of the smaller roles, Stones is notably impressive as Dr Tesman’s Aunt, and I enjoy Kelln’s choice to keep all the actors around a similar age. It keeps with Kelln and Cameron’s commitment to “push the boundaries of what it means to be a young artist” in their 13th Night Theatre Company productions. Here, it pays off; Stone portrays the staunch elderly woman without cartoonish caricature, setting up the play with a tone reassuringly distant from that of amateur drama.
Following this introduction we meet Dr Tesman; Jack Aldridge plays the nerdy professor with charisma, even if he’s outshined in a number of scenes. Aldridge is most impressive, nonetheless, in his interactions with the props–or Kelln’s purposeful lack thereof. Gazing at an imagined pair of embroidered slippers or closing the drapes of an implied window, Aldridge’s gaze makes the audience believe an object lies before him and invites us to use our imaginations.
This directorial choice is part of a wider trend of minimalism in contemporary theatre, one which admittedly made me sceptical as I waited for the show to begin. Nonetheless, Kelln’s meticulous production converted me, powerfully evoking questions about the visual expectations of the theatre medium in the process. Theatre is a unique entity, one that is both empowered and limited by the fact it is live. Unlike books, it is distinctly visual and yet, unlike films, it cannot be reshot, cut, and edited. Theatre theorists have long juggled with the question of how much visual context the audience should be given, or whether our own imagination and awareness of the piece’s theatricality should be expected to fill in the blanks. Where realness meets the imaginative elements of theatre is a profound subject matter that Kelln’s adaptation plays with considerably. This is by design; speaking to Mya Kelln, she explains to me that “minimalist theatre has a really cool way of making you feel like you are reading a book. It makes the whole experience more imaginative, and more unique to you as an individual.”
Even so, creative choices such as the abandonment of props can often be prone to silliness, which Aldridge does an impressive job to avert. That is not to say the play lacks comedy; in fact, Aldridge’s Dr Tesman is a refreshingly comedic respite in a number of tense scenes. The use of comedy to slice tension also emerges in the humorously jabbing comments Hedda mutters to Thea under her breath, and Eliza Cameron thrives when issuing Hedda’s passive aggressive social commentary. Bar her aggressive entitlement and a few gunshots fired from her father’s pistol without aim, Hedda’s greatest threat lies in her instigative words and the whipping lashes of her tongue.
Gabler is arguably one of the most complex female lead roles for an actor to sink their teeth into from the theatrical canon, and Cameron’s red lipstick adorned bite certainly leaves its mark. Cameron is a formidable Hedda; she is both irritating and sympathetic, spoiled and repressed, stubborn and crumbling. Despite Ibsen’s rich play text, in the wrong creative hands the titular character risks repeating the trope of a tormented housewife, falling into madness due to her domestic oppression and naivety. In Kelln and Cameron’s hands, however, Hedda reaches Ibsen’s potential as a far more nuanced protagonist, exuding a subtle strength that does not deal in dichotomies such as victim or villain, mad or sane, but rather as a character whose inner conflict convincingly cracks through her high-maintenance façade.
It is therefore impressively paradoxical that, in stripping down the staging to its bare bones, Kelln opens Hedda’s story up to become much more than a stereotypical domestic drama. Unlike previous adaptations of the play, in which the drawing room might be decorated with Victorian wood furnishings and period costumes, Kelln’s minimalist approach allows for temporal ambiguity that opens up the complex and universal afflictions that Ibsen’s play tackles. By refusing to paint the scene or visually signify Hedda’s life story, what Kelln achieves is the remarkable feat of making Hedda a complex character all in her own right, without being confined by visual prompts and historical fluff. Ibsen’s text is certainly at the core of this praiseworthy moral complexity, yet it is pronounced and interpreted masterfully by Cameron’s characterisation and Kelln’s production.
Another character that risks becoming a trope within the wrong hands is Thea Elvstead, a woman who runs away from her marriage after forming a close relationship with Ejlert Lövborg and who appears to have a hold over Dr Tesman. Lani Blossom Perry executes the depth in Ibsen’s Thea, portraying a woman whose sweetness is not forced even while her intentions for interjecting herself into the Tesman family are left ambiguous. Thanks to Perry’s complex portrayal, one is left with the lingering feeling that the softness of Mrs Elvstead’s character, which starkly contrasts Hedda, should not be mistaken for stupidity in spite of what the other characters imply. Perry’s Thea is not a one-note scheming homewrecker, though she is tactically ambitious for the sake of her work.
While there is no shortage of impressive performances in this small cast, Olsen Elezi is the pillar of every scene he’s in. Elezi’s Judge Brack stands tall throughout, unwavering in his blasé stance as he coolly dominates each scene. Brack’s character bears a similar complexity to Hedda; he is the closest thing the play has to a villain, yet he is never the slimy caricature that the text leaves open for. As they sneak glances and tease lustful tension, Brack's intellectually seductive connection with Hedda is convincing. Their quick wits collide and their intimacy is never forced—that is, until Brack blackmails her in the penultimate scene. Brack sees Hedda for her ambition in a way that no other character does, and the duo play a taunting game that proves disastrous for a woman afraid of “scandal.” With each calculated caress, Elezi'standout performance as Judge Brack lays the foundations for Hedda’s complete powerlessness.
Though Judge Brack is not the only character Hedda shares secret exchanges with; Bede Hodgkinson plays Ejlert Lövborg, the mysterious figure with secrets from Hedda’s past. Hodgkinson plays the inner affliction of the tormented Lövborg with convincing grit, shining in scenes in which the romance-fuelled power dynamics between himself, Thea and Hedda are on display.
At its core, this is an undeniably sexy production. Hodgkinson’s Lövborg repeats Hedda Gabler’s name in a tauntingly breathy exhale, while Elezi’s Brack prowls across the stage, shooting discrete looks to Hedda when no one else is watching. As ever, sex is laced with power, and Hedda’s frame, dressed in flowing white, glides along the furniture as she tantalises and tests the power dynamics of each scene.
Equally sexy is the use of strobe lighting by Kelln and the lighting designer, Jacob Hirschkorn. Admittedly, strobe lighting is a technique I am often critical of as a lazy way to convey mixed emotions or hazy nights. Nonetheless, its use in Hedda’s dream sequence at the end of Act I is genuinely effective, as flashing red light reveals Hedda’s deepest fears, sexual desires and Lövborg’s spiral into alcoholism. With the chilling, stony faces of the cast barricading the back of the stage, the sex scenes in this sequence were tantalising and tasteful, with effective intimacy coordination by Elektra Birchall.
A sequence that I found to be less effective was the recurring audio of babies crying, as used during certain scenes in the second half. While the purpose of the painful shrill of babies crying alongside the killing of Thea and Lövborg’s metaphorical “child” is not lost on me, there is something slightly overacted and emotionally lacklustre about its effect when we see Cameron psychotically smash Lövborg and Thea’s hard drive. The bloody handkerchief that emerges from the smashed hard drive is an intelligent touch, though I wonder if perhaps more emphasis on the backstory of Hedda’s relationship with having children is necessary to make this theme effective. Otherwise, the play seems to stray too far into supposing that Hedda’s turmoil is related to her lack of a child—perhaps one with Lövborg specifically—which seems to be a thematic detail that comes out of the blue in a production which otherwise resists divulging into the details of Hedda’s past.
For the most part, nonetheless, Hedda Gabler is compelling in its portrayal of inner turmoil. With its sleek black, white, and red colour scheme, the production has all the aesthetic appeal of film noir, but Kelln stays true to the original Ibsen text as to not let it fall into melodramatics. While it is clear Kelln takes inspiration from the work of Jamie Lloyd’s recent adaptations, this is where her Hedda Gabler crucially differs. Lloyd’s recent production of Sunset Boulevard, for example, leans brilliantly into the melodrama of Scherzinger as a washed-up Norma Desmond, balancing the injection of satire skilfully with the musical’s sinister and sympathetic undertones. A far cry from the 1991 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, however, is the Henrik Ibsen drama Kelln adapts. Her approach is appropriate, with her stripped set and calculated staging working to emphasise how the greatest strength of Ibsen’s writing is often his profound, blistering mundanity.
Presenting a form of minimalism that is unexpectedly rich in detail, Kelln’s direction is the star of the show. With impressive performances and an ever-pertinent Ibsen text at its core, Hedda Gabler at the Bread and Roses Theatre is a must-see production where simplicity overdelivers.
Hedda Gabler runs at the Bread and Roses Theatre until July 13th. Tickets are available here.
Under 25s can now get £10 tickets across the run with code GABLERU25
Written and edited by Georgia Gibson, Theatre Editor.
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