Pub quiz question: what do John Osborne, Brian Friel and Patrick Marber have in common? The answer is they’ve all written their own versions of Hedda Gabler. Although none of them, it should be noted, to any particular critical acclaim. Is it time to give up on the Hedda adaptations altogether and just stick to the original? Or maybe opt for a different tack: why not let a woman have a go?
Step forward, Cordelia Lynn, a 30-year-old playwright with three London productions under her belt. Having updated Chekhov’s Three Sisters for the Almeida this spring, she now turns her attention to Ibsen. And she isn’t afraid to get stuck in: not only has she changed our heroine’s name (she’s now Hedda Tesman, taking the surname of her doltish husband), she’s also made her three decades older, with a semi-estranged daughter and a taste for sloe gin to boot.
It’s an interesting idea, but does it work? Well, yes and no. As a character, Hedda Tesman is excellent: waspish, jaded, manipulative — and played brilliantly by the rather vampish Haydn Gwynne. The problem, though, is what Hedda 2.0 means for everything else.
Imagine Ibsen’s masterpiece as a perfectly tuned sound system. Move one dial and you risk pulling the whole thing out of joint. Lynn has aged only the Tesmans, for example, and not the other characters, which leads to some unintended confusion. When Hedda and Eilert (renamed Elijah) whisper about their past fling, we assume it was an extramarital affair rather than a youthful misadventure. And if Hedda is savvy enough to cover up cheating, why hasn’t she chucked Tesman already?
This isn’t the only niggle. Thanks to an odd production quirk — any objects relevant to the plot have been left as deliberately retro — there’s a danger that twists will be flagged too early in advance.
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