Queering Hedda Gabler feels completely natural. In Harriet Madeley’s modern-day adaptation, Hedda’s sexuality expands our understanding of story and character, offering a new explanation for her boredom with her wannabe-writer husband George (an affable, clueless Mark Desebrock) and creating a fresh intensity for her relationship with Isla (the character rewritten from Eilert, a layered and confident performance from Jessica Temple), with whom Hedda shares a secret past.
What struggles to breathe as easily in this new production is the text itself. The dialogue hides nothing, with emotions sitting right on the surface. This creates performances that are too broad for this nuanced story, grins too wide and voices too loud for a work of realism in which feelings should simmer before boiling over. Here, every resentment is on display from the start, which creates a sense of flattening throughout.
Annie Kershaw’s direction attempts to draw out more in-depth character studies by having the cast dip out of scenes to speak into microphones, creating a sense of privacy away from the physical space they share. But rather than digging deeper into their dark secrets, these only offer us extra exposition.
Anna Popplewell is cruel and careless as our bored lead, spending her days swatting away her new husband like he’s a persistently buzzing fly. Languishing in a crumbling house of indeterminate age – they talk as if it is a period manor, but the pink carpet and dipped conversation pit feel decidedly 1970s – she waits for someone to entertain her, for someone new to control. The air changes when Isla walks in, and with George’s 15-year university reunion an opportunity for the cast to gather, Isla’s easily overturned sobriety is a simple slide into chaos.
The undercooked text and overdone performances may not reveal dizzying new depths of Ibsen’s 132-year-old text, but the consideration of these characters as queer demonstrates the value of continuing to adapt and stretch this story. When Popplewell’s stony Hedda looks at Temple’s Isla, it feels like the most obvious fact in the world that this story of heady intensity and obsession is written about one woman in love with another.
• At Reading Rep theatre until 11 March.
