Hedda

Published Friday 29 August 2008 at 14:10 by Jason Best

What happens when you update Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler to the present day?

If you cut the play loose from the “social conditions and principles”, in Ibsen’s own phrase, of his age, does it still work?

Adapter Lucy Kirkwood and director Carrie Cracknell have shifted the play from late 19th century Oslo to up to the minute Notting Hill, and the result is electrifying drama, even if it does throw up some awkward problems their version can’t quite solve.

Cara Horgan’s sleek and dangerous Hedda, here the daughter of an eminent scholar not a general, is as bored with life as her predecessors. Like them, she has married a plodding academic (sympathetically played by Tom Mison), but as she lolls about, aimlessly, in her mortgaged to the hilt west London flat, she is not trapped by women’s social position but by her own nature.

Ibsen’s Hedda is undoubtedly a monster, but in the original play she possesses a perverse charisma and a restless intelligence. Here, Horgan’s Hedda is every bit as cruel to her frumpy sister-in-law Julia (Cath Whitefield) and to her former school friend Thea (Alice Patten), but her aimlessness seems the product of a shallow mind rather than lack of opportunity.

Despite this, the play still grips like a vice. Skilfully staged by Cracknell in the couple’s cramped flat (cleverly realised in the Gate’s stage space by designer Holly Waddington), Hedda’s encounters with the put upon Thea, with Christopher Obi’s smooth, predatory solicitor Toby (Kirkwood’s version of the original’s Judge Brack), and, best of all, Adrian Bower’s self-destructive genius Eli crackle with malice and threat.

By the time it comes to the moment when Hedda destroys Eli’s manuscript (now contained on a memory stick rather than paper), Horgan’s actions have an appalling fascination.