A promising opening that turns into a bloody mess: QUENTIN LETTS first night review of Hedda Gabbler

By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail

Published: 20:43 EST, 12 December 2016 | Updated: 20:43 EST, 12 December 2016

Hedda Gabler (Royal National Theatre)

Rating:

Henrik Ibsen’s repressed bunny-boiler, Hedda Gabler, has been given the sort of minimalist makeover they feature in magazines such as World of Interiors. Welcome to the lovely Scandinavian home of the good-looking Tessmans.

Image has become everything. The thing is set in a vast, 21st-century box of a flat with a buzzy entrance mechanism (entrances from the auditorium, heaven knows why). 

The furniture amounts to little more than a stripped-back upright piano and a wall cabinet showing – uh-oh – two handguns. Hedda (Ruth Wilson, who looks and pouts like a supermodel) spends most of the play in nothing more than a skimpy silk slip.

Ruth Wilson (right) as Hedda and Kyle Soller as Tesman play two newlyweds who feel very differently about their marriage in Hedda Gabler

To Ibsen veterans, this may at first be a relief. It is a change from the sort of claustrophobic, Victorian-era set-up normally used. And for the first half, I watched happily enough. 

But although it all starts in a blaze of modishness and has you thinking ‘director Ivo van Hove has done it again’, in the second half the drama slowly collapses as a credible proposition. By the end, it has become absurd – Hedda spattered by so much Kensington gore she looks as though she has been in a ketchup fight.

Miss Wilson plays this complex character unsympathetically from the start. Would it not be an idea to give her a gradual descent and, in the early scenes at least, for her to appear vivacious and attractive? She’s such a cow from the off, you wonder why any man ever fell in love with her.

Ruth Wilson plays the titular character in Henrik Ibsen's play about woman newly married and already bored with her marriage and life

Kyle Soller plays her academic bore of a husband as an earnest American. One of his rivals is Brack, a judge. You wouldn’t think so from the way Rafe Spall plays him. This Brack could be an internet start-up entrepreneur. We are given no notion of the serpentine Brack’s public respectability.

 Chukwudi Iwuji trots out a Lovborg who is surely too trendy to be the molten maverick the story demands. Sinead Matthews does a decent little turn as Lovborg’s unrequited admirer, Mrs Elvsted.

As a fashion spectacle it is all wildly self-absorbed and gives us the cliche of the modern drinks can being opened in a threatening manner by the baddie. The can contains blood, naturally enough.

For a properly moving account of one of the great European tragedies, however, you should look elsewhere.

Chukwudi Iwuji (left) plays Lovborg, Hedda's former lover who is having an affair with a former schoolmate of hers

 

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