Sara Topham as Hedda Gabler, right, and Joella Crichton as Thea Elvsted.David Hou/Stratford Festival
- Title: Hedda Gabler
- Written by: Henrik Ibsen, in a new version by Patrick Marber
- Director: Molly Atkinson
- Actors: Sara Topham, Gordon S. Miller, Tom McCamus
- Company: Stratford Festival
- Venue: Tom Patterson Theatre
- City: Stratford, Ont.
- Year: Runs to September 28, 2024
All points bulletin: Hedda Gabler, recently seen wreaking havoc to electro-pop in Toronto at the Coal Mine Theatre, has next been spotted waving her father’s pistols around to more tasteful tinkling on the piano a two-hour drive away at the Stratford Festival.
Hedda, for those unfamiliar with pioneering realist Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 drama, is a proto-Goth girl who likes to wear black and speak her dark fantasies aloud – and who, six months into marriage to a scholar named Tesman, is already bored to death.
At the Tom Patterson Theatre in Stratford, Hedda Gabler’s notable features include a proper star in the title role in Sara Topham, recently returned from Broadway, and a pared-down adaptation by the British playwright Patrick Marber, which sharpens some of Ibsen’s lines into spears.
Director Molly Atkinson’s production’s strongest suit is in the connections it makes between the house-poor Tesmans two turns-of-a-century ago and today’s financially stretched middle class. Lorenzo Savoini’s design features rich costuming, but a set consisting of only a single chaise longue at one end of the elongated thrust stage and a fireplace at the other.
Eager to please his new out-of-his-league wife, and on the assumption that he’s about to receive a professorship, Tesman (Gordon S. Miller) has taken Hedda on a months-long honeymoon and purchased this monster home he can’t afford to furnish.
So, the honeymoon is definitely over when the pair return to learn Tesman’s old rival Lovborg (Brad Hodder), a more creative scholar and old flame of Hedda’s who had fallen into disrepute, has “got sober,” published a hit book and is being considered for the same academic position.
Tesman’s bigger mistake than spending money he hasn’t earned yet, however, is in imagining that Hedda will ever be satisfied.
You’ve heard of the seven-year itch – well, Hedda’s has kicked in at seven months, and she’s already writing off her husband to her friend Judge Brack (Tom McCamus), a sexual schemer who seems to want to be more than her confidant.
“It was time,” Hedda says of her marriage, matter-of-factly. “I was tired of my chaotic life. I needed to settle. I settled for him. "
Rounding out the main characters is Hedda’s old frenemy, Thea Elvsted (Joella Crichton), who has pulled a page out of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and left her husband and step-children to follow Lovborg to town; she has saved him from his dissolute ways and now collaborates with him on his writing.
Though she claims to have tired of chaos, Hedda is clearly addicted to it. She hurts Tesman’s aunt’s feelings by disparaging her new hat in the first scene – and then proceeds to try to harm others more seriously, particularly those who have real purpose or love in their lives.
While Hedda never seems to be able to restrain her disturbing impulses, she exists in a very restrained, at times to the point of stiltedness, production. When one character gets into a violent fight off stage after a night of debauchery, he reappears with a delicate drop of blood on his shirt, but an otherwise unwrinkled suit. Though everyone is secretly lusting after everyone else, only Miller’s Tesman seems to display an actual sex drive.
The portrayals of the characters can feel aloof, one-dimensional even – with a solely sweet Thea and a purely predatory Brack flattening the play.
Even Topham’s performance has little spark – no doubt, partly on purpose. The interpretation is that Hedda acts the way she does because she is deeply depressed, signalled strongly from the start by blank expression, slow walk and hollow delivery of dialogue.
There’s no doubt that Hedda is, on one level, a victim of the patriarchy – but an overemphasis on this downplays the character’s own agency, privilege and uniquely twisted temperament.
This script by Marber was first used for a National Theatre of Great Britain modern-dress production from the great Belgian director Ivo van Hove – one that saw Hedda staple-gunning flowers to the walls, a tomato juice shower and Joni Mitchell’s Blue as a recurring musical motif.
By contrast, there is no choreography or visual flair to Atkinson’s production – music restricted to stormy classical piano during the scene changes. It runs just under two hours with intermission, while van Hove’s ran two hours and 30 minutes.
Marber’s stripped down script left room for directors and performers to fill it out with movement or images – or just wreak some havoc of their own in a show about a fascinating, destructive character. But Stratford’s production, devoid of such theatricality, feels simply perfunctory, and certainly not punk.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified actors Joella Crichton and Sarah Topham in the photo caption. The caption has been corrected.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)