Word: hedda
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...lights go down, the audience at London's Cambridge Theater looks up expecting to see the familiar opening scene of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler -Hedda's new husband nattering away with his auntie. Instead, in a startling departure from the script, Maggie Smith as Hedda strides silently onto the empty stage. Clad severely in white, she is pale and tense, her features a mask of mortal exhaustion and despair that might have been painted by Edvard Munch. She smokes, paces, contemplates herself in a mirror, stares moodily, doubles over in a spasm of nausea...
This dreamlike visual overture is a stroke worthy of that renowned master of the cinematic art, Ingmar Bergman. And no wonder. The Hedda unveiled by the National Theater troupe last week is a special restaging by Bergman of his 1968 Stockholm production. In it, the play moves out of the sitting room and into the psyche. Bergman's stage is relatively bare and expressionistic, luridly lit when it is not dark. On the peripheries of many of his scenes, characters who are supposed to be offstage linger to eavesdrop on the proceedings that concern them. Somewhat eerily, this shifts...
Compulsive Personality. Thus the problem of the play does not appear to be, as it does in many productions, the anti-feminist social conventions that confine Hedda. This Hedda would be no happier if she ran a company or broke out of her marriage. She is a victim not of society but of herself. She still flails viciously at the lives around her, but only in the throes of a long, vivid, tormented and inevitably losing struggle with her own divided nature...
Maggie Smith plays Hedda as a literally compulsive personality, icily aware and occasionally appalled by what she says and does, but helpless to stop herself. When she reaches out to pull the hair of her rival or burn the manuscript of the man she loves, her body lurches and twists in a jumble of conflicting drives to do the thing, not do it, and dissemble by doing something else. Her pale, strained face is a screen on which the shadow of one inner demon masters another, only to be mastered by a third. In keeping with the cinematically fluid rhythms...
...that his men appear flattened even before his women get to them. Miss Worth survives the limitations of her script, which makes her a good actress, and her own limitations as well, which may make her a great actress. Her final achievement is persuading the audience to think of Hedda Gabler not only as modern woman but as modern human being-that disordered creature of either sex whose tragedy is to need love all the more for not being able to offer...