Leafy Kingston isn’t where I expected to find a stylish, provocatively intelligent update of Henrik Ibsen’s study of thwarted womanhood. But that’s what writer Nina Segal and director Jeff James serve up here, along with an analysis of celebrity culture, power dynamics and even the nature of reality. It’s beautifully acted by a tight, six-strong cast led by Antonia Thomas, star of Misfits and The Good Doctor. Unfortunately, it all goes way over the top at the end but until then it’s absolutely gripping.
In Ibsen’s 1890 original, Hedda Gabler is trapped by society, patriarchy and her own notions of grandeur and romance. Here Thomas plays a former Hollywood child star whose chaotic life has become tabloid fodder. Having “lightly maimed” a paparazzo in her self-driving Tesla, she’s seeking absolution and credibility in an improvised film of Ibsen’s play for autocratic arthouse Svengali Henrik (Christian Rubeck, who is pitch perfect). Apart from Henrik and his long-suffering assistant Berta (Anna Andresen) everyone is referred to solely by the name of the Ibsen character they are playing.
A seeker of artistic truth, a bully and a sleazebag, Henrik hires the first love of Thomas’s “Hedda” to play her lover Ejlert in the film and fosters inappropriate intimacy on and off set. This is no straightforward study of toxic masculinity, though. As in Ibsen, Hedda uses her own power to shatter boundaries and cause destruction: part of that power lies in her ability to create life or annihilate herself.
Even the subsidiary characters operate on a hyper-aware level of the roles they play and the personal capital they possess. There’s a lovely running gag about Hedda’s flirtatious, younger co-star Thea (Matilda Bailes, excellent) also being the production’s on-set therapist and intimacy co-ordinator. Avi Nash and Joshua James are both funny and convincingly vulnerable as Hedda’s onscreen lover and husband. And Thomas is simply terrific as “Hedda”, by turns damaged, cocky, sensual and fierce.
The show, produced in association with the Norwegian Ibsen Company, looks cool and cinematic thanks to Rosanna Vize’s elegant set of modern rooms stacked atop each other. But it’s also very “meta”, with characters sometimes looking on as spectators and Rubeck announcing the interval from the stage. The show’s ruminations on artifice, reality and control are subtly done until the last 15 minutes, when the plot spins off into repetition and absurdity. Shame: but I still left with my brain buzzing.
