Hedda Gabler

We performed Hedda Gabler from November 17th to December 2nd 2006.

Hedda is frustrated and unfulfilled. Ibsen’s desperate housewife sets out on her destructive and tragic path.

Directed by David Green, the play featured four of the cast from RoughCast’s previous Ibsen, the acclaimed production of A Doll’s House – Paul Baker, Mark Burridge, Grant Filshill and Sarah Gray. Hedda was played by Sarah Farrar, an extremely talented young actress making her RoughCast debut. Other members of the cast were Yves Green and Pat Parris.

Background

Hedda Gabler is one of the most enigmatic figures in world theatre. The spirited daughter of a military general, she has married a plodding academic. Hedda is clearly frustrated, dissatisfied and unfulfilled. But what does she want out of life, or the situation in which she finds herself. The question has been debated among critics since the play was first performed in the 1890s.

There are similarities with Emma Bovary, Flaubert’s 19th century protagonist, who is also bored and stifled by both a loveless marriage to a mediocre husband and the banality of domestic life. Emma seek romance to give her life some meaning but this fails to satisfy her – with devastating consequences.

By contrast, Hedda does not appear to seek love, or at least she is not prepared to risk scandal in order to pursue an affair which might, temporarily, make life endurable. Trapped in a domestic role by a male-dominated society, she resorts to trying to control others and, in particular, to influence the destiny of one of the men around her – with catastrophic results.

Early critics described Hedda as deviant, defective and lacking motive, a monster created by the author in the form of a woman who has no counterparts in the real world. But Hedda exists and she has a message for the 21st century; desperate people commit desperate acts.