For this NCT production Kirsten Brandt adapted Ibsen’s play for a smaller cast, directed by Norma Saldivar. Here are the evening program and Know Before You Go Audience guide.
With such a complex main character, there have been so many interpretations, but here’s my take on Hedda’s motives:
Dramaturg’s Note: The Only Way She Knows To
“Hedda… Gabler! Hedda Gabler!” whispers Ejlert Lövborg to the play’s protagonist upon reconnecting with his former love interest, now married to another man. Indeed, Hedda never really transforms into Hedda Tesman, the last name of her new husband, who just splurged on a spacious villa and a lengthy honeymoon trip, counting on the money yet to come from a pending professor’s appointment.
But this couple is obviously sharply mismatched: Hedda is a member of the social elite of Norway’s capital, Christiania (now Oslo), treated like royalty as a young woman by her father General Gabler, and now skilled heir to his guns – an unusual break with traditional gender roles at the time. For a woman seeking thrilling experiences, however, her marriage is a not just a step down, socially – into a less prestigious family who needs to sign mortgages to sustain her demands for a lavish lifestyle – but also a plunge into social boredom. Tesman, a scholar of “the domestic industries of the Low Countries in the Middle Ages” couldn’t be more of an antithesis to his new wife. A “specialist,” in the belittling definition Judge Brack offers of him, he managed to combine their recent grand tour with a research trip that yielded a full trunk of archival documents: they clearly attract him more than anything else in his life. Hedda, however, is adamant she requires more “generalist” entertainment and enjoys Brack’s company, who offers to become the more stimulating third vertex of a social, if not (yet) openly sexual triangle.
Interestingly, the most expected conflicts in this play are soon deflated: Tesman is neither jealous of other men Hedda had previous flirts with, like Lövborg, nor of current social acquaintances; and although Lövborg has recently written a book that has become a sensation and surpasses Tesman’s yet unpublished one on a similar subject (with another even better one forthcoming), he is uninterested in competing for Tesman’s post at the university. Thus, financial ruin is easily dodged by the Tesmans. Instead, the most impactful events all stem from Hedda’s unbridled desire for power over others’ lives.
For an author like Ibsen who perfected the art of indirect allusion in regard to socially unpleasant topics, this play’s secret is in fact the most domestic: the forbidden words – never pronounced but always implied – are “mother” and “children.” If Tesman is slow to acknowledge that the remaining two empty rooms in their new house could be occupied by newborns rather than bookshelves, Hedda positively declines to confirm the conjectures of her new family members, who read her recent florid appearance as a sure signal of her pregnancy. If Nora in the same author’s A Doll’s House (1879) abandoned her children to regain her freedom as an independent agent, Hedda (1891) actively refuses to accept that her more nurturing role become a reality. Instead, she fantasizes about molding Lövborg’s destiny, whom she now decides to tempt to relapse into his former destructive habits in hopes to induce him to a beautiful, albeit tragic ending.
Yet, her (almost) perfectly conceived scheme, as you will see, doesn’t really go according to plan: a manuscript forever lost gets a chance at resuscitating, a former enemy turns into an admiring friend, a new triangle is formed, and Brack turns out to be more dangerous than expected. Hedda has no choice but to escape in the only way she knows to.
