Writer: Dan Sinclair
Director: Josh Maughan
In this brave update of Ibsen’s 1891 classic, Hedda’s pistol is firmly duct-taped to the wall like that banana touring art galleries around the world. We are now in London with Hedda gender-swapped as a man. But this Hedda is just as bored and just as privileged as the original, sitting around the apartment with nothing to do except snort more drugs and toy with a child’s keyboard in an effort to play ABBA’s Chiquitita. All around him, people discuss art. Dan Sinclair’s version of Ibsen’s play about boredom and agency is compelling and surprisingly faithful. If only it weren’t so shouty.
Joe Harrington plays a blinder as Hedda, arriving on stage with a brutal hangover. He booms his lines like the loudest public schoolboy, his mouth full of silver spoons. He takes umbrage with the bottle of Kylie pink champagne he finds on the living-room table, unforgivably declaring that the Princess of Pop has only released two good songs. In Ibsen’s original, it was a discarded hat that caused Hedda’s snobbery to rise to the surface.
That hat belonged to Julie, the aunt of Hedda’s academic husband, but here, the sparkling wine has been left by the new intern, B (short for Bertha). In Ibsen’s shocking play, Bertha is the maid with little to do but answer the door and arrange flowers. Here, she’s hilariously reimagined as an intern, employed by Hedda’s husband Georgie to help his campaign to win the prestigious Turner Prize, an award that he thinks is a shoo-in. He plans to create an installation comparing the Regent’s Canal to South African apartheid. He’s nothing short of a jerk.
Georgie has insufferable friends. Social media influencer Lord Anthony (Judge Brack in Ibsen) sweeps odiously around the Marylebone apartment making snide remarks about everyone while Tia (Thea) is a ghastly Sloane Ranger, her head full of nothing but herself. Eilert, in another gender swap, is a little quieter than the other…until she hits the drugs, at which point she shouts just as loudly. Only Jools, this version’s Aunt Julie, keeps their cool.
All the cast could do with dialling down the volume a little. The upper classes don’t get through life by yelling; they gain their position through plummy accents that can carry authority without having to raise their voices. They may speak loudly, but it’s not the same as shouting. Even B, in a reimagined end, can only get her point across by screaming at the other characters.
It is B (a convincing performance by Saskia Mollard) who is foregrounded in this new version. She’s in almost every scene and rather than count the minutes to when Hedda is going to implode the audience is left to wonder how much more humiliation B can take from her new employer and his cohort. It’s an interesting way to flesh out the lower-class characters of late 19th Century drama who are so often consigned to the shadows. However, B’s last-minute speech denouncing vacuous upper-class society doesn’t quite work. Would Hedda be so moved to action as a result of this rant? It’s doubtful.
Ibsen left the audience to decide what Eilert would tell Hedda in the early days of their friendship: stories about freedom, agency and sex, perhaps. In Sinclair’s iteration, Eilert (Ciara Southwood) is an artist who seems to get kicks out of filming gay men having unsafe sex in backrooms. Of course, the risks that some gay men take, now sharpened by chems such as meth and crystal, are important and topical subjects for a play, but the themes are a little confused in this refashioning of Hedda Gabler.
Even though the plot doesn’t completely hang together, there is much enjoyment to be had in admiring the clever revisions to the original script. Instead of books being thrown on fires, footage is deleted from a camera; instead of handing Eilert a gun, Hedda tells her that the light catches Blackfriars Bridge beautifully at 7 in the morning. Every alternative from Sinclair works a treat. Even better if Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is fresh in one’s mind.
Runs until 1 February 2025
The Reviews Hub Score
People don’t do such things.
