Hedda Gabler: Signposted to the end
From the start, as Rolanda Marais enters in black lycra shorts, black stiletto heels, black blazer, and covered head to heel in a black veil, it was clear what we were about to watch was not a standard version of Hedda Gabler.
Marais’ unhinged, dance-like jerks atop a brightly underlit glass-topped coffee table swept away any doubts of normality, and the entrance of the male characters masked as animals – rooster, duck, horse – shoved us, stumbling, into surreality.
The scene change to Hedda’s new husband George Tesman and his aunt Juliana entering the door in an imposing plexiglass set while engaged in dialogue assured us this Christiaan Olwagen adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s late 19th Century classic was not a conceptual dance piece. Well, not all of it.
Hedda reveals her fangs almost as soon as she enters – in this case after rising from the black leather couch on which she supposedly slept after her surreal fit, which could have been a dream, after all.
That George (played by the effervescent Albert Pretorius), and Juliana (excellently played by Martelize Kolver) don’t notice she was sleeping on the couch and act as if she just entered the room, is a deliberate undermining of reality repeated in various forms throughout the play. Hedda is in turns stained with red liquid (blood, we guess), streaked with dirt, and abnormally dishevelled, yet neither George, nor Juliana, nor the unscrupulous friend Judge Brack (Stian Bam) ever take note of her state. This underscores Hedda’s invisibility even as she takes ever more desperate measures to be seen.
The same is applied in some degree to Thea Elvsted (Ashley de Lange), a former school acquaintance of Hedda’s.
This gives weight to Ibsen’s observation that women’s independent needs were, and continue to be, overlooked. What was – still largely is – required is they align their views with those of men, who, when it pertains to women, choose simply not to see what they don’t want to see.
For anyone who has their eyes open, the willfully blind patriarchal view often creates surreal scenes, and Olwagen leans into the surreality with a will. The entry of Eilert Lovborg (Ludwig Binge) – Hedda’s former lover and George’s former colleague – puts a spiraling edge on an already tense situation.
This edge is expertly honed by Wolf Britz’s scorching lighting effects and Charl-Johan Lingenfelder’s cinematic sound design. The pair of them a double-edged razor slicing through our nerves as Marais’ Hedda jerks on the strings of unseen puppeteers operating beyond the confines of her gilded cage.
With Britz and Lingenfelder and superb acting by the cast – Marais, Pretorius, and de Lange in particular – Olwagen’s English translation of an Afrikaans translation from, presumably, an English version of the original realist Danish text, gives us a sizzling, lascivious, unhinged, neon-goth spectacle of Hedda Gabler that demands our gasping attention.
Yet despite the ingenious blindness of the male characters, in all this translation, Olwagen seems to have lost the key tenet of the play, which is that Hedda is constrained, that there is a cage, however gilded. In his director’s note he states: “Her tragedy isn’t that she is trapped – it’s that she sees the trap so clearly and walks into it anyway.”
But while Hedda may not be seen for you she is, or believes herself to be, there is no clear sense she is trapped, whether she sees it or not; she seems to say and do what she pleases from the outset. That George chides her for being rude to his aunt seems less a command to abide by social expectations than a plea for common decency, and anyway, George comes across more as her plaything than a figure of authority. Far from being buttoned into suffocating expectations, this Hedda seems very much able to do as she wants. It is not clear that her choice to marry George was not so much a choice as the lesser shackle available in a world ruled by men. And that she can’t quite have the luxuries promised her by her new husband due to his financial constraints seem more the complaints of a spoiled child than betrayal of premarital promises.
She has sexual authority over all the men, has a strength of character that cows Thea, and the aunt comes across more a nuisance than an oppressor. The impression is that what Olwagen gains in violence, he loses in nuance. Hedda is made to seem very much her own woman; there is little sense that the social order has any bearing on her. This can be accepted, if we are to reimagine Hedda in the light of our knowledge that she is nonetheless forced to act within the social strictures of Ibsen’s original play, with the interludes of staccato physicality and stains and dishevelment being metaphors of her inner state.
But Olwagen oversteps. Not only does subtext disappear, it is replaced with overt signs, just in case we didn’t get it. This signalling, which appears throughout the play, becomes literal when words such as ‘slut’, ‘bitch’, and ‘whore’ are painted – in blood red – on the back of the perspex walls. It turns the play into parody. All the pop, bang, and armrest-clutching whizz morph into diversions that stand in the way of us establishing sympathetic understanding of Hedda’s plight. After pumping up the pressure to a drum-tight tension, the air streamed out, turning a taut Zeppelin of a performance into a floppy, impotent balloon.
Hedda Gabler is on a The Baxter Flipside theatre until 24 May. Book here
Photo: Rolanda Marais as Hedda Gabbler, with Albert Pretorius. Photographer: Jeremeo le Cordeur