Like all good plays, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is one where there’s loaded guns at the beginning and you’re waiting for the bangs at the end. His classic drama about a bored newlywed who disdains her husband and manipulates her ex-lover should build and build until the guns are finally used, but in Tanika Gupta’s super-smart adaptation the tension never quite ratchets up.
Gupta was inspired by the life of Golden Age Hollywood actress Merle Oberon, who always insisted she was Australian when it turned out she was Anglo-Indian – The Hays Code, which governed what films of the time could show, prohibited depictions of ‘miscegenation’. Here, the setting isn’t 19th-century Norway but Chelsea in the late forties, just after India gained independence from Britain; Hedda is an Anglo-Indian actress too, also hiding her heritage, an act of self-denial that is tearing her apart, and has forced her to retire.
