There’s a reason Hedda Gabler is known as Hamlet for women. Henrik Ibsen’s beautiful 19th century aristocrat is an antiheroine for the ages, so murky in her actions and contradictory in her desires she gives you whiplash. It’s a character not just to sink your teeth into, but one to tear apart sinew by sinew, tendon by tendon. And you well may want to: Hedda is as repulsive as she is captivating.
It was all this and more that struck director Nia DaCosta (The Marvels; Candyman), when she first came across Ibsen’s perilous protagonist as a drama school student in London a decade ago. The play, written in 1890, concerns Hedda, a high-society woman who marries a dull academic named George. Bored out of her mind in domesticity, she toys with her acquaintances, chief among them her ex-lover Eilert Løvberg, who happens to be her husband’s academic rival. Emerging from a period of debauchery and disrepute, with a new and brilliant book in tow, Eilert is doing well for once. Enter Hedda.
