Reginald Theatre, June 13
8/10
Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is a play that, like the painting of Edvard Munch and saxophone playing of Jan Garbarek, enshrined the rest of the world’s idea that Norwegians revel in desolation and despair. In 2023, British playwright Nina Segal crafted this work about shooting a film of Hedda. Like Ibsen’s, it forensically probes the psyche of each character, but with the crucial difference that amid the strata of darkness are fine seams of comedy.
The film’s being shot outside Oslo, and its director, Henrik, strictly refers to cast members by their characters’ names, and so that’s how we know them, too. Henrik, the auteur from hell, demands a purity of truth from his cast to elevate their work above mere acting, and Segal has their lives merge with those of the characters. Given that Hedda is a tragedy, it’s unlikely to end well.
While Segal’s script is flawed in its resolution, director Monica Sayers’ Secret House production is stunning in its completeness. James Smithers not only plays a relentlessly ruthless Henrik, he designed a striking set, fully exploiting the potential of the Seymour Centre’s Reginald Theatre. Into a raised stage is sunk the film set, a sofa-lined oblong pit, behind which are two dressing-room trailer interiors, wwith even the theatre’s gantry high above being used.
The acting more than matches the design. Jennifer Rani is Hedda: once a US child star, before drugs, alcohol and injudiciously running over a paparazzo besmirched her career, and inclined her to accept a role in far-flung Norway. She’s a premature Norma Desmond of sorts, and Rani plays her with unflinching commitment.
Much of the humour comes from the character of Thea (Lib Campbell), Hedda’s competitor for the affections of her old flame, Ejlert (Alpha Sylla). Thea is also the set’s psychological therapist and intimacy coordinator, which makes her almost as busy as Berta (Jane Angharad), the film’s put-upon first assistant director. Campbell gives Thea a layer of eccentricity to go with the buffed confidence in her own competence and sex appeal.
Matthew Abotomey is also funny as Jorgen, Hedda’s damp squib of a husband, who rather delights in others’ misfortunes. Angharad’s Berta is hard-nosed and pragmatic, while having the soft underbelly of a mother who never sees her young son because of Henrik’s unceasing demands.
Sylla’s arrival as Ejlert, a major star of US action movies, ratchets up the multidirectional tensions, as he, too, thought he could reinvent himself in Norway (perhaps this could be a tourism marketing device?). He’s been proudly sober for a year until Hedda’s pressure, resulting from Henrik’s bullying, squeezes the resolve out of him. Sylla gives a performance powerful enough to match Rani’s, and therefore make credible their past passion and its reignition.
Ibsen’s play dictates that certain fates were always sealed, but, oddly, the way Segal reaches her conclusion seems to spring from a jarringly different genre.
Until June 27.