Underpowered Ibsen

The tone is the thing. Ibsen is among the heaviest of the heavy-going playwrights and his masterpiece, Hedda Gabler, is an unbearably tense psychological thriller that ends with one of the biggest shocks in the theatrical repertoire. The play takes us into a doomed marriage between Hedda, a brilliant and eccentric depressive, and George Tesman, a dull-as cheesecake university lecturer.

Director Anna Mackmin has read the Old Vic audience correctly. They’ve spent all day at the office, raising enough funds to buy tickets, and they’re not interested in a three-hour Nordic brain-bruiser. Instead, they want a frothy, offbeat marital comedy with a few sad bits. And that’s what they get. Mackmin has used Brian Friel’s interventionist script, which includes lots of gags and comic speeches that undermine Ibsen’s gravely emotive original. Lez Brotherston has recreated the Tesmans’ home from an elegant confection of whites and greys but with one ominous detail: there’s a pop-up glass kiosk in the middle of the living area, like an internal greenhouse surrounded by an outer sitting-room.