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Ibsen without the highs and lows
Alice Bonifacio as Hedda Gabler and David Sayers as her former lover Eilert Loevborg. Pictures: George RiddellHedda GablerIcarus Theatre Collective
The Roses Theatre, Tewksbury
****
Icarus Theatre Collective, under
Producer-Director Max Lewendel, was responsible for touring Frank
Wedekind’s landmark 1890s play Spring
Awakening last year. The
quality was absolutely first-class: concept, direction, set, acting,
characterisation; and the exquisite way they addressed the issue of
burgeoning teenage sexual angsts, and their pained consequences, in a
manner that was a model of unprudish free expression, restraint, honesty
and sensitivity. Their other 2013 touring
staging was in the same vein: Romeo and Juliet, a production that
similarly ached: intense passion, well-cast role-sharing, and a
handsome, feverish presentation from start to finish. I wish I had seen Othello,
which Icarus toured this Spring. I would have anticipated a like
intensity, and the same degree of inspiration. However I did manage to
catch their other production right at the end of its tour, Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler, which started its provincial trail at Uppingham
Theatre, Rutland, and has visited
West
Midland venues Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury and Stafford Gatehouse,
rounded off by the Roses Theatre, Tewkesbury. Nothing will stop me asserting
this company is one of the best young outfits in English theatre today,
giving a platform to some of the ablest prospects setting out on their
acting career, or from encouraging you to see them whenever they come
anywhere near you.
But I have to say, this Ibsen
seemed to me to fall short in several respects. It was well plotted and
often excellently moved, but self-evidently underdirected. The quality
of the pacing was very mixed, and palpably detrimental. The acting hit
the target often, but less often than one would have hoped. Theo Holloway is credited for
music and sound. The music had little feel for period or moment or
location. Occasionally spooky (some nice contrabassoon, or so it seemed)
in a banal, unfocused kind of way, it added virtually nothing and
sometimes tangibly detracted. Michael Meyer’s famously proficient
translation seemed, for all his having been ‘the definitive translator
of ten or more Ibsen and some eight-plus Strindberg’, to lack a real
feeling for cadence. A vibrant young company like
this deserved and needed something more vigorous. The desultory set, by
Christopher Hone who also designed their Othello, struck me as
verging on a disaster, though it just about served, in the way you might
accept an amateurish, essentially two-dimensional set in amateur drama.
One bit that worked particularly well was the burning of the (supposedly
only copy of) Loevborg’s book by Hedda. Seen from the front, the glow
was highly effective; unfortunately from the side you could see
underneath the platform, which spoilt the effect. A bit inept. Ilona Kahn’s costumes were
rather good: you really could imagine the (as we later learn)
dangerously randy, perverse, even perverted Judge Brack (Julian Pindar)
or confused Thea Elvstead (Holly Piper) had stepped straight out of a
late 19th century Danish or Norwegian painting. In some ways it was David
Martin’s Juergen (George) Tesman, Hedda’s haplessly intellectual,
family-oriented, naively loyal husband - in Othello Martin played
Iago, a character as far removed as it would be possible to be - who
held this production together. Tesman is at the least
consistent: wielding a clay pipe, faffing over old fashioned
courtesies,
poring over family documents, deliciously boring with his lightly
lilting put-on voice, but in the end a total turn-off for his
emotionally explosive, sexually-charged young wife (Alice Bonifacio).
You can see (‘imagine having to spend every month of one’s life with one
person’) why she is headed for suicide even at the start, even without
her appalling machinations: how else can it end? Cast as Ford in Shakespeare’s
Merry Wives for Illyria Open-Air Theatre, that is more or less
how Martin plays George here: a fond, bumbling dolt. It works well, and
I found his moves and little half gestures always interesting. A prat,
but a patently noble one whose academic pursuits might actually better
the world. The general's pistol. Helen Bonifacio as Hedda Gabler. Hedda, the famous general’s
spoilt daughter who behaves with military ruthlessness (‘more her
father’s daughter than her husband’s wife’, as the playwright
suggested), is onstage virtually throughout, and it was latterly that
Bonifacio seemed to acquire stature and detail: a flick of the head, a
sudden freeze, a smirk, a slight sidle, or a rather smug striding across
the stage. Earlier, less so. She is deliberately positioned – sometimes
almost stuck - stage right by Lewendel, and brings to Mrs. Tesman/Gabler
an aptly dangerous, Medea-like quality, never more so than when her look
assumes a kind of frozen, death’s-head quality. Perhaps it is she, in her mainly pink costume (but towards the end, fabulously transformed to blue by Kahn), who suffers the most from the amateurish, indoor orangery-look of Hone’s bald, tricolour set (a clanky platform – if theirs - should have been cured early in the tour, surely). It is somehow difficult to
take anyone seriously in the context, and Christopher Withers’ lighting,
though well focused on the three main acting areas, could do little to
redeem it. The intrusions work rather
better. Not so much Deborah Klayman as Tesman’s nurturing aunt
Julia/Julie, who needs much more work to appear believably old
(hopefully she fared better as Emilia to Holly Piper’s Desdemona); or
indeed Pindar’s Brack, a character well enunciated but still something
of a schoolboy reading, strengthening later as he reveals his amoral
side, but scarcely convincing early on (he doubled the role with Gary
Stoner, Icarus’s Othello, who may have showed more force). But Piper’s Thea Elvstead (Elvsted) struck me as a reading laden with strengths, touching on depth. She moved better, produced a believably mixed-up kid of a woman, and held one every time she bewitchingly spoke. Yet the best find was David Sayers as Eilert Loevborg, the former love interest Hedda, with ghastly pinpoint precision, drives to needless suicide. Bonifacio, whose stage left
exits (bar the last) always added something sinister, produces her best
when dealing with Eilert; and Sayers his, when desperately trying to win
back Hedda. He seemed almost head and shoulders above the others; even
while ridiculously sentimental and overborne, he lent a maturity frankly
lacking elsewhere.
One of the things that most
rang out in this staging was how young all Ibsen’s characters felt –
little more than those in Spring Awakening, written at exactly
the time Ibsen’s play was premiered at Munich’s Residenztheater. It was
as if Hedda was, perhaps 16, George maybe a 19 or 20 year old who
matriculated and graduated early and is already on a postdoctorate, the
lawyer just a youngster with an eye on the main chance, Eilert a foolish
but talented, Byronesque, novel-penning student. It’s clearly not so;
but the play didn’t feel like a masterpiece by a 62/63 year old master,
and the plot’s hyperbole and the expressionistic panache of the
characters didn’t seem a patch on, say, Chekhov, or Turgenev, or even
Gogol. My most serious complaint,
then, was that this undertaking made Hedda Gabler seem, at the
worst, trite. There was little undertow; to the credit of all, one could
sense petulance and manipulation, smugness and innocent stumblings, but
none of those extra subterranean rumblings that are needed to make Ibsen
great. Even the final shot was – well, bathetic. Imagine All My Sons
ending like flatly. It was evident, even, in the
Servant/Butler character of Kaiden DuBois, an actor just three years
into the trade who positively scored, an advert equally for aching teen
heterosexual yearning and blossoming gay innocence, as last year’s Romeo
and as little Hans in Spring Awakening. Proffering umbrellas or used
as a clothes horse himself, the butler was ubiquitous in this play. But
there was no design to his moving, no extra structuring, not much more
than the odd knowing look or suppressed sigh; a school play showing.
Formerly Lockwood in LCT’s The History Boys - but surely a Dakin
in the making - he could have been so much more. And so he doubtless was from
time to time, for though merely an Ensemble player in Othello,
DuBois is listed as Hedda Gabler’s male understudy, which means
he may have needed the diversity to play desperate Eilert or fond
husband Jürgen. I’d have been glad to see him as either; and my hunch is
he could have stood in for Hedda pretty well too. Hedda Gabler ends its
run at the Yvonne Arnold Theatre in Guilford on 08-05-14. Roderic Dunnett
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