Fiona Reid and Diana Bentley in Hedda Gabler.Elana Emer/Supplied
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- Title: Hedda Gabler
- Written by: Henrik Ibsen
- Adapted by: Liisa Repo-Martell
- Director: Moya O’Connell
- Actors: Diana Bentley, Nancy Beatty, Andrew Chown, Shawn Doyle, Leah Doz, Qasim Khan, Fiona Reid
- Company and Venue: Coal Mine Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: To Sunday, June 2, 2024
The Coal Mine Theatre’s revival of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler comes on the heels of the Toronto company’s previous show, Dion, a rock opera about Dionysus, and it’s tempting to feel some of that Greek mythology vibe extended into this fascinating production.
There is, of course, Hedda’s famous vision of her old lover, the alcoholic genius Eilert Lovborg, appearing “with vine leaves in his hair” – suggesting at once both a victor and the god of wine. But director Moya O’Connell seems to have picked up on that and has also given her Hedda, played by an alternately alluring and frightening Diana Bentley, a spectacular dance of wild abandon like one of Dionysus’s female followers.
Hedda, the great anti-heroine of modern theatre, also reminds us of her Greek antecedent Medea. Where a jealous Medea kills her children to punish the unfaithful Jason, Hedda cruelly destroys Lovborg’s “baby,” his masterpiece, conceived with the new woman in his life.
That’s where the similarities end, though. Hedda is a far more complicated character, her motives the subject of endless debate. Even our inclination to see her as an unfortunate victim of time and place, her frustrations born of her limited options as a woman in a 19th-century patriarchal society, doesn’t quite cut it. If she were a man, like her late father, General Gabler, she might be leading armies and wreaking mass destruction.
As it is, her taste for destruction, limited to one hapless victim, is horrifying enough.
O’Connell’s staging, in the Coal Mine’s super-intimate East Danforth space, has us sitting like so many flies-on-the-wall around Hedda’s drawing room. All the better to witness her appalling acts – and study some fine acting from one of the company’s typically impressive casts.
Qasim Khan in Hedda Gabler.Elana Emer/Supplied
Qasim Khan, with wire-rim glasses and wool sweater, is the picture of a mismatched mate as Hedda’s husband, Jorgen Tesman, the nerdily enthusiastic academic who has just spent part of their six-month honeymoon abroad doing research on medieval handicrafts. His marriage to Bentley’s sultry, sarcastic Hedda can only be explained by her need to maintain a bourgeois lifestyle. He is, as she suspects, slightly absurd, but also brimming with innocence and decency. (Khan, too, brings a vibe from a prior show, having just played Eric Glass in Canadian Stage’s The Inheritance, another innately decent character.) He shares those traits with Julia Tesman, the old aunt who raised him, embodied with endearing sweetness by the great Fiona Reid. Another treasured actor, Nancy Beatty, plays her long-time maid Berta and in one brief scene the gentle pair conjure up the kind of caring, compassionate household that nurtured him.
Hedda and Jorgen have only just returned to Norway to take possession of their supposed dream home, when a distraught Thea Elvsted (Leah Doz) arrives on their doorstep. Lovborg, Jorgen’s brilliant but dissolute intellectual rival, has sobered up in the country and published a history book that’s causing a sensation. Now he’s back in town and Thea, who has become his loving collaborator, is trying to locate him, afraid he’ll fall prey to temptation.
When Lovborg (Andrew Chown) does turn up, he’s still a teetotaler. He also has the manuscript for his latest work, which promises to eclipse his current bestseller. Hedda, reduced to fist-clenching exasperation over the life she’s gotten herself into, sees an opportunity. Where women in her world are expected to support men’s careers (and have their babies), she’ll take power over this one and shape his destiny. As a nasty first step, she needles him about his masculinity, pushing him off the wagon.
Chown’s intense Lovborg is almost comically awkward, but you can see the struggle of a newly recovered addict who is afraid, not just of the bottle, but of his old obsession with Hedda. It’s Doz’s Thea, however, who really wins our sympathies when she tearfully breaks down and admits to Hedda that she too is trapped in a marriage – a far more terrible one to the Sheriff Elvsted, a much older and unloving man.
Hedda is a hidden threat to these good and good-intentioned people; her only potential foil is a fellow manipulator, the family friend Judge Brack. Portrayed by Shawn Doyle, he’s a figure of well-groomed confidence, a bro with the guys and a sleek blackmailer when it comes to Hedda.
From the left: Andrew Chown, Diana Bentley (back), and Leah Doz in Hedda Gabler.Elana Emer/Supplied
There’s another vibe running through the Coal Mine show – Crow’s Theatre’s recent, superb Uncle Vanya. That’s partly thanks to Liisa Repo-Martell, who adapted the Chekhov classic and now does the same with Ibsen’s. Again, she artfully remixes the dialogue into contemporary Canadian English, sprinkling in a few current expressions as well as the odd obscenity or graphic detail that wouldn’t have made it past the censors in Ibsen’s day.
O’Connell, meanwhile, takes a page from Chris Abraham’s Vanya concept with a similarly immersive configuration – although it’s hard not to be immersive in the Coal Mine’s tiny theatre – and a few fanciful flourishes (including the dance mentioned above). Designer Joshua Quinlan creates a variation on his Vanya set, complete with fogged French windows, as well as its semi-historical costumes – with a provocative all-black wardrobe for Bentley’s Hedda from Toronto’s Horses Atelier.
There’s a striking new element, however, in the visceral score by indie rocker Emily Haines of Metric fame, whose powerful music seems to amplify Hedda’s unsettled interior with deep, heart-like throbbing and great surges of sound that could be her roiling blood.
The Coal Mine’s isn’t the only major revival of Ibsen’s play this spring. It’s going Hedda to Hedda, so to speak, with a new production at the Stratford Festival, now in previews (it opens May 30). I can’t wait to see it. This show has only whetted my appetite for another opportunity to ponder one of western theatre’s most compelling and disturbing characters.