WATCHED - Heddar Gabler

Hedda Gabler by Ibsen by the late 20th century had become one of theatres standard plays. Unlike many of its contemporaries, it centres around the life of a female character in fin de siecle Norway. A woman trapped in a world devised and maintained for the benefit of men. In the midst of which Hedda trys amd fails to obtain agency over her life. 

Hedda Gabler (Ruth Wilson) has a past, of being a much pursued 'catch'. She cleverly plays the field, with a succession of flawed or devious men, whilst avoiding committing to any of them. Hedda, comes from aristocratic stock, and would be high maintenance for anyone who finally marries her. For if she must eventually marry, she knows exactly what she materially wants out of it, to make life bearable. She naively thinks she will be able to play the game and make it work for her.

At the beginning of the play Hedda and her new husband Jurgen Tesman have just returned from their honeymoon. Terminally bored with him already, but he serves an ulterior purpose in keeping her more persistent old suitors amours at bay. What happens during the play is that this marriage reveals itself to be as much, if not more, of a prison. No deterrent for the advances of Judge Brack (a serpent like Rafe Spall) a man for whom coercive control is a primary mode of operation.

This adaption is written and updated with great skill by Patrick Marber, and directed with modernist starkness by Ivo van Hove. The staging is this huge space of a sparsely furnished modern apartment, with bare plastered walls. The sense of unfinished business permeates the stage. Central to it is of course Ruth Wilson as Hedda, who is simply compelling to watch how she flips from forced bonhomie to, strident independence of spirit, to a lost melancholy, usually accompanied by Joni Mitchell's Blue. You know this is not going to end well for her, but still you hope even as the odds become increasingly stacked against her, that maybe this situation could turn around. A totally phenomenal production.

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8. 

Currently available to stream on National Theatre at Home.