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Hedda Gabler (TV)
R2 - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (2nd July 2008). |
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The Show
 This adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play was adapted for the television by the British playwright John Osborne. Premiering in Germany in 1891 to largely unfavourable reviews, Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler is often taken as tapping into the same cultural wellspring from which Freudian psychoanalysis developed, and there have been many psychoanalytic approaches taken towards the play that are based around the complexity and ambiguity surrounding the various characters’ motives: the play seems to suggest that people’s motives are not always rational and can often be driven by the subconscious—people may suggest that they aim to do one thing but their actions lead them in an entirely different direction. Other people have interpreted the play as a critique of the growing bourgeoisie in Europe during the late 19th Century. The play begins following the marriage of the aristocratic Hedda Gabler (Diana Rigg) and the bourgeois academic George Tesman (Denis Lill). Hedda’s boredom with her marriage and with Tesman become immediately apparent as, upon entering the scene, she bickers quite coldly with her husband and Aunt Juliana. (Significantly, the play conveys Hedda’s boredom with her marriage through its title, retaining Hedda’s maiden name.) Tesman is a simple man, pleased when Aunt Juliana (Kathleen Byron) returns his old slippers to him; but Hedda is not easily pleased, and in her first entrance she interrupts the light-hearted conversation between Tesman and Aunt Juliana by complaining loudly that ‘The French windows are open and you can’t see for being blinded by sunshine’. Furthermore, when Tesman suggests that Hedda might be pregnant, she shrinks from the suggestion and declares simply, ‘Oh, don’t. Please’. Hedda is unfulfilled by her relationship with Tesman and her new standing in society, and more than once she expresses her alienation through firing the pistols that her late father left her. This dissatisfaction with her husband is compounded when Judge Brack (Alan Dobie) visits the Tesman house and reveals that Tesman must compete for the Professorship that he assumed was already his; banking on acquiring the new Professorship, Tesman has burdened himself with debt, buying a new family home in readiness for his life with Hedda. By contrast, Hedda sees the new competition for the post as a challenge that Tesman must overcome in order to ‘prove himself’. Moreover, it is revealed that Tesman’s competitor for the Professorship is Eilert Løvborg (Philip Bond), who has formed a strong association with Hedda’s old schoolmate Thea Elvsted (Elizabeth Bell). Taking Thea as his muse, Løvborg has produced a new manuscript that seems to have the potential to leave Tesman out of the running for the Professorship. However, it seems that Hedda has committed an indiscretion with Løvborg and acting out of either guilt towards Tesman or spite towards Thea Hedda takes steps to sabotage Løvborg’s potential for success. The character of Hedda herself has been interpreted in different ways: for some, she is a proto-feminist hero, a woman who is repressed and oppressed by male-dominated society; for others, she is a villain who manipulates and deceives the other characters around her. Diana Rigg’s performance in this television adaptation walks a tightrope between these two interpretations of the character: from the outset, Rigg plays Hedda as cold and somewhat dismissive, especially in comparison with her husband and Aunt Juliana: in the first act, Tesman and Juliana are engaged in a light-hearted chat when Hedda enters the scene and takes charge of the conversation, complaining about the presence of too much light and declaring that the room ‘needs a bit of fresh air in here, all these flowers all over the place’. She is moody and dismissive, constantly interjecting into other people’s sentences. Furthermore, after her former school ‘friend’ Thea is introduced Hedda is revealed to be an extremely spiteful character: Thea admits that she was frightened of Hedda, reflecting that ‘You used to pull my hair. Once you said you’d like to put a match to it and burn the whole thing off’; later in the play, Hedda once again threatens to ‘burn off that hair’. However, despite these negative character traits Hedda’s dissatisfaction with her position is understandable: we sympathise with her precisely because she feels so trapped and downtrodden. Rigg’s Hedda is also highly sympathetic because Rigg subtly manages to capture Hedda’s sense of entrapment within patriarchy, not to mention the ways in which Hedda is haunted by the missed opportunities of her past—an aspect of the play to which we can all relate. The play deals with very 20th Century concerns of the kind that were central to modernist literature and theatre (e.g. Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce), such as the individual’s sense of alienation from society. These concerns are still very prevalent today, mostly in narratives that revolve around the ‘individual’ who is pitted against ‘the system’ (e.g. Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, 1971; the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix, 1999). In her battle against ‘the system’, Hedda is very much a modern woman and a figure of identification for a modern audience. The conflicting aspects of Hedda’s character are perhaps most concisely summed up in a piece about the play that was written by Elizabeth Hardwick for The New York Review of Books in 1971: ‘Hedda Gabler is one of the meanest romantics in literature. She is not offered as a grotesque, but given the very center of the stage, and yet she is always mean-spirited and petty in both large and small matters. The only other romantic figure of a corresponding hardness and cruelty is perhaps Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights’ (Hardwick, 1971: en). It is this ambivalent aspect of the character that Rigg captures so well in her performance, and this holds the whole adaptation together. The direction is good: the adaptation avoids being too ‘stagy’ thanks to some fluid camerawork. However, it’s a far less ‘cinematic’ adaptation than the 1975 film Hedda (Trevor Nunn, 1975), which featured Glenda Jackson in the title role. The play is presented in four acts and runs for 83:52 mins (PAL).
Video
The adaptation seems to have been shot on 16mm film. It is presented here in its original aspect ratio (of 4:3). There are no problems with the transfer.
Audio
The adaptation is presented in English, via a 2.0 stereo track. Dialogue is clear. Unfortunately, there are no subtitles.
Extras
None. Some detail on the play or the relationship between this adaptation and some of the other interpretations of Ibsen’s text may have been helpful. The play cries out for some form of contextualisation.
Overall
This is a very strong adaptation of Ibsen’s play, thanks in part to the ever-reliable John Osborne’s adaptation and the performance of Diana Rigg in the title role. The other performances are less strong, but thanks to the camerawork the adaptation doesn’t feel completely stage-bound. It makes a good companion piece with the Glenda Jackson-starring 1975 feature film Hedda, adapted and directed by Trevor Nunn. Thanks to its cinematic nature and bigger budget, Nunn’s film is probably a better adaptation overall; but as television adaptations of theatre texts go, this television adaptation of Hedda Gabler is in the top tier. The absence of any contextual material is slightly disappointing but can be easily forgiven. References Albert H. Silverman, 1971: ‘What happens in Hedda?’ The New York Review of Books (November 4; Vol 17, N. 7) Elizabeth Hardwick, 1971: ‘Ibsen and Woman II: Hedda Gabler’. The New York Review of Books (March 25; Vol 16, N. 5) For more information, please visit the homepage of Network DVD.
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