Lucy Kirkwood’s play is an enthralling account of an unhappy woman who is married to a scholastic buffoon, loves her guns, and threatens to destroy herself as well as those who surround her. If that and the title sound familiar, it’s because Kirkwood has updated Ibsen’s ‘Hedda Gabler’ and moved her to London today. Hedda is languishing in a distressed Notting Hill flat, while Tesman, her husband, is waiting to hear whether or not he’s got a senior lectureship at UCL in his specialist subject of robotic ants. Best of all, Cara Horgan’s Hedda (pictured) doesn’t throw Eli’s only manuscript on the fire, but rather dismantles his memory stick and, with great difficulty, swallows the relevant bit (although surely Tesman, given his expertise, would be able to track down the original?).
Like all great classics, Ibsen’s play transcends its time and yet there are problems with taking it away from a context in which women had few rights. With a conventional production, it’s possible to feel the weight of Hedda’s restrictions and sympathise with her frustrations however badly she behaves. Here, the barriers to her freedom exist only in her head, despite her reference to herself as ‘damaged goods’ and her failed applications for jobs (including one to the Ministry of Defence!). She becomes less mysterious and more of a calculatingly evil woman of soap opera proportions as she deliberately hurts her sister-in-law’s feelings, wrecks Thea’s happiness, and sends Eli to his doom.
That said, Carrie Cracknell’s production makes the most of Kirkwood’s sly humour and it’s easy to understand why men would fall for Horgan’s capricious, beautiful Hedda. She certainly can’t bear them to praise other women and it’s painful to see how she uses the phrase ‘my love’ in a final, doomed attempt to bring her husband to heel. Tom Mison is also excellent as the unimaginative Tesman whose schoolboy sense of humour would surely annoy any woman.
