Seduced by Hedda
Lloyd Evans
Hedda Gabler Almeida Medeamaterial (etc.) Theatro Technis The Girl with Red Hair Hampstead To make boredom exciting is one of the riskiest theatrical effects. The danger is that the play will become slack and selfdefeating. But, if the experiment succeeds, the audience finds itself riveted by an unknown but horribly familiar quality, a dynamic stillness which appears to have no substance at all. Richard Eyre’s Hedda Gabler pulls off this feat. There are moments during the fraught second half when a vibrant torpor settles over the stage. And the actors, mired in the stifling pettiness of their preoccupations, seem genuinely uncertain what they’re going to do next. Just like life. They stop being counterfeits and become human beings, and the play itself, that most improbable of contrivances, emerges into reality and truth.
There is very little to fault in this production. Eve Best plays Hedda as a horsey snob with dark impulses lurking beneath her scarlet bodice. A particular delight is Iain Glen’s sly, dashing Judge Brack with his Errol Flynn swagger and caddish facial trimmings. He prowls the drawing room like a highly civilised tiger waiting to pounce on Hedda and gobble her up. But there’s a problem here. Glen is just too good, too rippingly attractive for the text.
Hedda’s men enter her drawing room on an ascending scale of masculinity. Her husband George is a mincing invertebrate excellently played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Judge Brack should be little more than a slimy goal-hanger awaiting his moment. By the time Loevborg, the philosophising nutcase, joins the party we have heard so much about his brainpower, his hell-raising and his booze-fuelled seductions that it would take a star of Jack Nicholson’s stature to fulfil our expectations and surpass Iain Glen’s dominance of the scene.
Jamie Sives as Loevborg is younger, shorter and slighter than Iain Glen, with a thinner voice and a less imposing presence. Even his Scottish accent seems effete rather than threatening. And his hairstyle is all wrong. Where Glen has sleek Victorian whiskers, Sives has a crop of shaggy backcombed highlights that make him look a sixth-form drummer rather than a full-blown Byronic psychopath. When he dies, Hedda is free to pursue an affair with Judge Brack. Most women would be happy with that. But Hedda blows her brains out. This odd mismatch is a minor kink in an otherwise riveting production.
There’s a peculiar new trilogy at Theatro Technis whose full title is longer than this sentence. The production is the brainchild of someone called Cradeaux Alexander. That’s not a misprint. Like his name, everything about his show seems wilfully perverse. The first of the three plays, all by Heiner Müller, involves two ill-lit actors spouting drivel at each other. The next is a master-and-servant romp set in pre-1789 France. A simple text bizarrely complicated by the decision to share the two roles between four actors. That’s not a misprint either. Every line is delivered by a pair of voices speaking together. Bonkers. In the final piece, the director performs a version of Medea, alone on stage, reciting various voices into various microphones, stark naked. All we learn from this is that vanity is the sibling of madness. Cradeaux Alexander has christened his production company ‘iMind’. Another eccentricity. That lower-case ‘i’ means that any sentence beginning with the company’s name will look misspelled. iMind about that quite a lot. It’s a standard achievement of the fringe to annoy a reviewer during a show but to irritate him while he’s back at his typewriter takes a special talent.
Sharman Macdonald’s new play The Girl with Red Hair is a big, sprawling, generoushearted, emotionally stirring pile of tosh. Four disparate sets of people, vaguely connected to each other, conduct rambling conversations on a Fife beach. The scenery is a junkyard of conflicting effects. Everything we see is poorly integrated. So is everything we hear. Macdonald has a single knack: a scatty, long-suffering Godfixated female voice. She can’t imagine a man. She can’t tell a story, nor can she create dramatic architecture. Her wittering morons are barely able to engage each other in their confessions, let alone interest us. Their chatter feels more like a series of soliloquies forced into the same room.
You might contend that this is what conversation consists of, but Macdonald is too haphazard an artist to make an argument on those lines. Instead, all she makes is copious supplies of boredom. But this isn't the heightened, poetic ennui of Ibsen, it's the humdrum bus-stop slackness of time passing. In other words, this is the kind of experience that makes you want to run off and write a play.
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