Hedda - Gate Theatre (Review)
Review by Rebecca Omonira-
Oyekanmi
ONCE in a while if you are someone who doesn’t watch TV, you stumble across a sitcom/drama/comedy that holds your attention for a full 30 minutes or even an hour perhaps. Usually it is sexy, attractive, grossly unrealistic and utterly inane like Friends or Sex & The City.
Lucy Kirkwood’s modern version of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler inspires exactly this emotion. It’s enjoyable but ultimately pointless.
Kirkwood smoothly transports the tale of a 19th Century heroine struggling against the limitations of her gender in a patriarchal society to contemporary London – and West London to be precise.
Kirkwood’s Hedda is the daughter of an Oxford don just back from a six-month honeymoon with her besotted academic husband. They live in a highly mortgaged flat in Notting Hill.
The trouble is Hedda is not in love with her husband, George, and despises his kooky sister, Julia. She is also suicidal, depressed and angry to find that, after the death of her father, there is little meaning in her life. Hedda’s desperate attempts to grasp hold of life are sad and arouse pity, at a stretch sympathy.
But her predicament is hardly tragic. Ibsen’s Hedda had little chance of a career or the free life she dreamt of beyond being a wife, mother or daughter. But in 2008, though Hilary didn’t quite shatter that glass ceiling, most women have the opportunity to forge a life for themselves and by themselves.
Kirkwood does try to confront this by slipping in the fact that Hedda has applied to work at the Ministry of Defence and been rejected. I suppose this could be tragic if one has a father with the right connections.
The problem is not that Ibsen’s play is obsolete. It just doesn’t apply to bored and privileged young women in Notting Hill, no matter how depressed.
Set in East London, Whitechapel perhaps, in a strongly patriarchal home where many young women really do live tragic and controlled lives, this modern Hedda might be more convincing.
Hedda runs from August 21 to September 27, 2008 at the Gate Theatre. For more information and tickets call the box office on 020 7229 0706 or visit the website.