Certain plays, love ’em or hate ’em, are useful in the same way standards make a great playground for singers and jazz musicians. A play that everyone knows—or at least knows something about—can be a framework, a jumping-off point for all kinds of imaginative interpretations. The late-19th century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen has given us two works in particular that actors and directors love to revisit: both A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler are stories of unruly women, characters who take decisive action without courting masculine approval. Nora, of A Doll’s House, is a wife and mother who walks out on her family, society be damned. The title character of Hedda Gabler is a bored, unhappily married aristocrat who toys with the fates of those around her as a way of seizing some control over her own life. These are women who have just had it. There’s no sell-by date on their anger, and so they resurface in the culture time and again.
There’s a lot of fury in Hedda, Nia DaCosta’s visually inventive, if somewhat disjointed, reimagining of Hedda Gabler—though it’s the kind of fury intended to invigorate rather than alienate. Tessa Thompson stars as the willful heroine, married to a rather meek academic, George Tesman (Tom Bateman), who’s angling for an important university position. His chief rival is a woman who has already published one brilliant treatise and just completed another, Eileen Lovborg (played by the terrific German actress Nina Hoss); she also happens to be one of Hedda’s ex-lovers. The setting is Hedda and Tesman’s glorious English country house, sometime in the 1950s. The duo is throwing a party—Eileen will be there, along with her current paramour, also a collaborator in her work, Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots)—though tragedy will strike by the night’s end. Meanwhile, a manipulative judge, Roland Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), lurks around the fringes, hoping to seduce or even blackmail the electrically attractive Hedda….
