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A CurtainUp London London Review
Hedda



Why does everything I touch just curdle? Like a curse. I want things to be beautiful and brave and every time they turn out ridiculous. Ridiculous and low and ugly.— Hedda
Hedda
Cara Horgan as Hedda and Tom Mison as George Tesman
(Photo: Marc Brenner)
The Gate Theatre, with an average seating of just 70, may be a compact auditorium but under the joint artistic directorship of Carrie Cracknell and Natalie Abrahami, has huge aims of integrating internationalism and physicality into the tiny theatre. Their latest production, an adaptation of Hedda Gabler by Lucy Kirkwood, the writer of the E4 teenage drama Skins, uses this manifesto to update Ibsen and explore the constraints facing women in 21st century.

Set in modern day West London, the characters wear skinny jeans, there is one scene in a nightclub and Eli's precious manuscript is consigned to a memory stick. Unfortunately, this is really the extent of this rather superficial adaptation, and Hedda is more a modern dress production than a contemporary reincarnation of Ibsen's drama.

The original's themes are not engaged with in any more depth, nor its implications translated into a newly relevant scenario. Hedda (Cara Horgan) is the kept daughter and then wife of an Oxford academic, so her situation can hardly be called the common lot of the modern day female, nor is it even particularly specific to the twenty-first century. By removing the strict pre-feminist society of nineteenth-century Scandinavia where women were actually imprisoned by social mores into unhappy marriages and pecuniary dependence, the sympathy of Hedda's plight, as well as her sheer powerlessness, is severely undermined.

Cara Horgan plays Hedda as irritable and caustic, only sympathetic to others in falsity when pursuing a selfish agenda. Although there is no substitute for the rigid restraints of the original's social setting to explain Hedda's feelings of entrapment, Cara Horgan's Hedda is still interesting to watch, in all her magnetic destructiveness and physical brittleness.

Tom Mison is the genial if geeky George Tesman, who lounges around in cardigan fashion disasters and works on the scintillating masterpiece Robotic Ants and the Mapping of Consciousness. Adrian Bower plays the darkly captivating Eli Longford as a rough, loose cannon of a genius and Alice Patten is the fragile, flap-prone Thea. Updating the character of Judge Brack, is Christopher Obi's cool solicitor Toby who is both sleek and formidable.

In addition to a convincing cast, the dialogue itself is naturalistic and speakable, with only rare moments of the mundane and the stilted creeping through. Moreover Carrie Cracknell's energised direction and a beautifully dilapidated set of the Tesmans' crumbling basement flat (designed by Holly Waddington), means that the evening is an engaging, if ultimately somewhat frustrating one. Watchable and fairly involving, the execution of this production is expert, so it is a shame that the adaptation does not grapple with Ibsen's text in a more exciting or intelligent way.

Hedda
Written by Henrik Ibsen
Adapted by Lucy Kirkwood
Directed by Carrie Cracknell

With: Adrian Bower, Cara Horgan, Tom Mison, Christopher Obi, Alice Patten, Cath Whitefield
Designer: Holly Waddington
Lighting Katharine Williams
Choreographer Temitope Ajose-Cutting
Sound Ed Lewis
Running time: Two hours 5 minutes with no interval
Box Office: 020 7229 0706
Booking extended to 4th October 2008
Reviewed by Charlotte Loveridge based on 6th August 2008 performance at The Gate Theatre, 11 Pembridge Road, Notting Hill Gate, London W11 3HQ (Tube: Notting Hill Gate)
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