June 15, 2008
As you take your seats for Ibsen’s play of intrigue and social malaise a man’s portrait stares balefully down at you from a great height. This is General Gabler, the man who has obviously shaped his daughter, Hedda and made her the cold, manipulative woman that she is. Ibsen himself said that Hedda is her father’s daughter, not her husband’s wife. This is a play of powerful emotions played against a background of social strictures and great limitations, especially on women. Hedda plays with guns and other people’s lives because she is bored with her own life; she likes the power that her beauty gives her. She and Judge Brack play a very dangerous, in the end fatal, game with each other and Hedda proves herself the most courageous of all of them.
The problem with this play is that a lot of the action happens off-stage and is narrated by one of the characters so it is a very wordy play which puts a heavy burden on the actors to keep interest alive. It is also all too easy to make the characters two-dimensional – Tesman a buffoon, Thea too sincere etc. On the whole the actors made their characters three-dimensional, but four or five dimensions would have been better. Susanne Sheehy did icy and femme fatale beautifully and looked the part, but I wished that she could also have been more BORED. Boredom was really what drove her, not real malice or spite. I take exception to the programme notes here – in what way is Hedda a female Hamlet? She is motivated and acts entirely differently from the moody but emotional Hamlet. Alistair Nunn as George Tesman was sometimes a buffoon, but he could also show great emotion and a variety of tone. I was not convinced by Alex Nicholl’s Judge Brack: he is supposed to be very manipulative but he seemed too neutral. Again I take exception to the notes – there is surely nothing father-like in Judge Brack’s attitude towards Hedda. Phoebe Thompson also struggled to make her rather dull character come alive but on the whole Tomahawk Theatre Company carried off a difficult play.
For those of you who haven’t discovered it yet, the North Wall is a theatre beautifully converted from a swimming hall in North Oxford and is a wonderful addition to Oxford’s cultural life and to Summertown.
The problem with this play is that a lot of the action happens off-stage and is narrated by one of the characters so it is a very wordy play which puts a heavy burden on the actors to keep interest alive. It is also all too easy to make the characters two-dimensional – Tesman a buffoon, Thea too sincere etc. On the whole the actors made their characters three-dimensional, but four or five dimensions would have been better. Susanne Sheehy did icy and femme fatale beautifully and looked the part, but I wished that she could also have been more BORED. Boredom was really what drove her, not real malice or spite. I take exception to the programme notes here – in what way is Hedda a female Hamlet? She is motivated and acts entirely differently from the moody but emotional Hamlet. Alistair Nunn as George Tesman was sometimes a buffoon, but he could also show great emotion and a variety of tone. I was not convinced by Alex Nicholl’s Judge Brack: he is supposed to be very manipulative but he seemed too neutral. Again I take exception to the notes – there is surely nothing father-like in Judge Brack’s attitude towards Hedda. Phoebe Thompson also struggled to make her rather dull character come alive but on the whole Tomahawk Theatre Company carried off a difficult play.
For those of you who haven’t discovered it yet, the North Wall is a theatre beautifully converted from a swimming hall in North Oxford and is a wonderful addition to Oxford’s cultural life and to Summertown.