Last night I caught Thomas Ostermeier's modern, chic, deadpan-sexy Hedda Gabler. Call it Laptop Hedda (Here, Lovborg's pivotal manuscript is on a laptop that Hedda hammers with determined disaffection.)
Okay, let's run the numbers. In the last few years, we've had Regional-Theater Hedda; Camp Hedda; Euro-garde Hedda; Robot Hedda; and, also at BAM, Aussie Hedda.
Ostermeier's vision for Ibsen's 1890 bourgeois tragedy is most similar to Ivo van Hove's chilly, modern update that New York Theatre Workshop produced in a sensational 2004 production that starred the sublime, fearless Elizabeth Marvel. But Ostermeier, 38, who also runs Berlin's esteemed theater Schnaubuhne, goes further than van Hove (who famously staged Judge Brack's subjugation of Hedda by having Brack sadistically/kinkily pour V8 juice all over her face.)
The director and his dramaturg, Marius von Mayenburg, have taken liberties with Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel's translation, inserting references to the aforementioned laptops, but also AIDS, a Korean prostitute at an Asian "sex club," and they've inserted stage business that requires cellphones. That's in addition to the terrific set. Jan Pappelbaum's ultra-modish glass, black stone and concrete apartment rotates at key points in the show, depicting action in a living room, on the patio or in a back room. A wall of 14-ft tall sliding glass doors opens out onto a patio with lillies on ceramic vases (which Hedda shoots at one point). A large tilted mirror upstage above the set allows the audience to see what's going on in upstage areas of the set beyond our vision. You'll wish you could live there, as long at the end of the day you didn't have to shoot yourself in the head.
Between scenes, Ostermeier makes nearly unaffected use of Beach Boys/Brian Wilson songs, such as the tender-creepy "God Only Knows." And the acting, all of it hiply understated, is basically naturalistic. The cumulative effect of all this style and visual beauty is a seductive image of European haute-bourgeois urbanity. A life lived with the veneer of "Asian" simplicity (think Ikea or much more trendy Euro-chic) but a poor cover for the murderous boredom that bubbles beneath.
As the keeper of that homicidal ennui, Katharina Schuttler is an interesting choice for Hedda. Petite, gamine, but in possession of an icy, minx-like sexiness, Schuttler is unusually young (26) for the part, which often goes to a slightly older actress. But she exudes the restless, immature boredom an ex-club kid or failed fashion model. I'm almost surprised that Ostermeier didn't have her snorting coke or popping Ecstasy at some point to escape the endless irritation that stable married life with academician Jorgen Tesman (Lars Eidinger) brings her.
While the class distinctions of this Hedda Gabler are less clear than they might be in a costume-drama version, I didn't miss them a bit. When's the last time, after all, when those distinctions were relevant to the audience? After World War I? II? (Hedda is the semi-aristocratic daughter of a general; the rest are just grasping middle-class louts to her.) Here, her monumental disgust with the people around her comes more from a style gap than from social rank. You could say that she's the opposite of a regal lady stuck in a suffocatingly proper context; she's a proper lady who's desperate to be bad, cheap, low. Of course, in Ostermeier's version, this Hedda is the most benumbed of all, sexually inhibited and almost allergic to human touch, even though the men around her paw her constantly. It makes total sense when she exhorts Lovborg (the lissome, insanely cool Thom Yorke-like Kay Bartholomaus Schulze) to kill himself and "make it glorious," considering the petulant hausfrau she has become.
The irony is laid on even thicker by Ostermeier's tweaked ending. (I missed 2004's Nora, his similarly updated version of A Doll's House, which ended with the title character slamming her way out of the house, then coming back and gunning down Torvald.) Normally, Hedda shoots herself in an adjacent room, the others rush in, cry in horror, and Judge Brack shouts something like, "But people don't do such things..." Here, when the gunshot rang out from behind a wall, the other characters were startled, then played it off with a chuckle and proceeded to not notice Hedda slumped dead and bleeding against a wall, as the set revolved to the tune of "God Only Knows." Even in her glorious moment of defiant self-sacrifice, Hedda goes unnoticed.
So, going back to the title of this post: This Hedda Gabler is worth a visit. Three more shows till it packs up Saturday night. It is first-rate Euro-modernized, ironized, super-stylish classic theater. The Roundabout, the Pearl, and even Classic Stage Company will probably never be able to produce canonical drama this smart, stylish and effortlessly relevant. It's the Hedda to see before ignoring the damn text for a few years.
UPDATE: Yesterday, my mellifluous-voiced and keen-witted TONY colleague, classical music & opera editor Steve Smith, posted his thoughts on the production here.
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