ARTS Hot ice and strange snow
ROBERT CUSHMAN
It is probably true that Ingmar Bergman's production of Hedda Gabler (National Theatre at the Cambridge) is less than a complete realisation of the play. But let there be no ingratitude: this Hedda is a gift-horse, a display of theatrical hypnotism such as I have never encountered before in Ibsen, and seldom anywhere else.
And anyway who talks of disrespect to a classic? This is the first time in my ex- perience that a director has trusted Ibsen's text sufficiently to rescue it from its tradi- tional trappings—trusted it, in fact, as we trust Shakespeare. A play that can only be performed in an over-furnished box set is a second-rate play, and is liable to appear less than that at a time when the very sight of a roomful of horsehair sofas can make the average theatregoer see red.
Red, indeed, is what Bergman and his designer, Mago, have seen; the dearly- bought Tesman mansion has been turned in- to a scarlet vault, suggesting one of the plushier circles of hell. Circular and hence inescapable; this is not A Doll's House and Hedda cannot escape merely by slamming the door. She has to kill herself. This set, though, is functional rather than symbolic, a brilliant interim solution, but one which will make life no easier for the next designer of Ibsen. Just as the text has been pared of familiar catch-phrases (and the omission of the vine-leaves in Lovborg-'s hair must be credited to Bergman rather than, as has been widely assumed, to the translator, Michael Meyer) so we are grateful to this decor for what it has left out, and for focusing all at- tention on the actors. You can spend a rewarding evening merely in observing the grouping which, for economy, subtlety and grace has no peer in London.
But perhaps the most amazing thing about this production is that though it appears to be a move-for-move reproduction of the
Swedish version we saw at the Aldwych two years ago, there is no sign of. the English
company having been dragooned into an alien formation. These actors have never been more fully themselves.
And certainly Maggie Smith has never been more gainfully employed. She has sometimes seemed to me a schizophrenic ac- tress; unassailable in comedy (and her Mrs Sullen in The Beaux' Stratagem was the female performance of the year until the mo- ment she stepped on stage as Hedda), she consistently missed fire in supposedly higher things—not (as with Geraldine McEwan) because of technical barriers but because of a mischievous spirit of self-criticism, a sense that, after all. 'people don't do such things'. But the fact that they don't is, of course, Ibsen's constant theme; master builders who break the rules by climbing towers are liable to severe corrective treatment. Hedda, who knows, by a sort of race-memory, what heroism might be but is totally incapable of it (as are those around her—witness Lov- borg's bungled suicide) is the perfect role for a tragedienne manquee.Iler burning of Lov- borg's manuscript, her suicide, are acts of parody, and they respond marvellously to the touch of an actress in whom passion and irony exist on equal terms, of mutual enrich- ment (as with Mrs Sullen) or, as here, of mutual destructiveness. This is hot ice and wondrous strange snow, a progressive cadenza of disgust with her husband, with the world, and finally with herself. We knew of course that she would get laughs (and no other Hedda is ever likely to extract so much wit from the mere men- tion of the Dolomites) but, for once at the National Theatre, they never appear at unwanted moments. (It may be that an ex- cessive caution has been at work; I nurse a suspicion that the reason for the non- appearance of those vine-leaves is that Miss Smith got up one rehearsal and refused to say the line.) The production, as has been widely noted, stresses the sexual rather than the social springs of Hedda's frustration, the plight of nineteenth century generals' daughters being by now of limited interest, but motivation matters here as little as it does with lago.
Drama is a continuous present even in Ibsen (who tells far less of this story backwards than usual) and it is the spectacle, lucid and ineluctable, of self-destruction in progress that rivets the attention. Bergman's pacing, measured but never portentous, is impeccable and Miss Smith thrives on it, establishing a chrystalline relation with everyone else on stage. Maybe she wipes the floor a little too easily with the women (poor Mrs Elvsted is going to be a wreck by the end of the run), but the men, with a magnanimity of direction rare in this play, are all allowed to be worthy of her steel. John Moffatt, his invariable polish ac- centuated to gleaming point, is the perfect Brack, and Jeremy Brett, imaginatively cast, furnishes Tesman with a latent virility whose flowering (at the despised Thea's hands) deals Hedda the last, bitterest and most ludicrous blow. The tragic hero dies because he has done too much; Hedda because she has done nothing and never will.
If economy rules at the Cambridge, The Winter's Tale (Aldwych) offers sprawlingly generous compensation. I doubt if I shall ever be reconciled to the RSC'S pious way with Guiding Concepts ('time' and 'grace' are the magic words here, turning to holy ashes in the mouths of all who speak them) and I can still not relate .the dialogue on nature and art or Perdita's lyrical seed- catalogue ('lilies of all kinds The flower-de- luce being one'—I ask you) to anything much beyond the facile moralising Shakespeare's last plays are distressingly apt to provoke. Its most engaging modern pro- ponents are of course the hippies, and Trevor Nunn's production makes the connection overt; his Bohemia, with Derek Smith's Autolycus a riotous cross between Max Wall and Mick Jagger, really swings. I mean rocks.
It has too the grace of Judi Dench's Perdita, a gratifying slice of nostalgia for those of us who fell in love with this actress during her early days at the Old Vic. And, as if to justify our faith, she doubles im- peccably as her own mother, in full com- mand of rhetoric and emotion. (If this has been Maggie Smith's week for getting it all together it has been Miss Dench's for taking it apart and letting us relish the components.) Hardly behind her is Elizabeth Spriggs' Paulina who changes gear from nursery governess to avenging angel with ex-
hilarating dexterity.
Admittedly some of the laughs she gets are at the expense of Barrie Ingham's Leontes and he cannot afford them, since he already has to contend with an interpretation of the part that renders him not merely jealous but plain crazy. The lighting goes blue and the action slow to illustrate his aberration; he is not allowed to observe the dialogue between Hermione and Polixenes (provocative enough in word and gesture) which sup- posedly sets him off. At the close, intoning his lines like a computer and flanked by two attendant lords apparently dressed as mental nurses, he seems bereft of free will and thus, by definition, an impossible protagonist. And yet the moment at the end when the lights brighten to release him from his sixteen- year-old obsession is remarkably beautiful and could hardly exist without what has gone before. The faults of this production are in fact inextricably bound up with its virtues. I would not have it other.
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