Hedda Gabler: My Violent Valentine
Canadian Actor Fiona Reid on Henrik Ibsen's Tragic Protagonist
Co- Star of Canstage's The Clean House, who once played Hedda Gabler, shares her insight into one of theatre's most fascinating and intoxicating female characters.
An unexpected pregancy, a loveless marriage, and the return of a long-lost soulmate! Now our heroine is really screwed. She's been trying to move on, to find some stability, to leave the past behind. But now he's back. Her head tells her one thing, yet her heart says another.Damn Cupid's Arrow! If I cannot have him, no one will.
Love hurts,and in Hedda Gabler's complex world, the wounds run very deep. Underneath those gay, devil-may-care quips to the various men in her circle, Hedda's soul is decaying and her impulse knows no bounds.
Isben makes Hedda such a wit rather like the best of Shakespeare's women. That's refreshing.
Fiona Reid: "Hedda has a wonderful sense of humour and a wonderful sense of irony. She is trying to make the best of this. I think it’s fair to say that there’s a certain morbidity to what she does. She has a fascination with death, and there’s a point where the balance gets tipped. What’s so intriguing about this story is a woman gets up in the morning of one day having returned from a six month honeymoon and 48 hours later, or even less, she’s dead. And that to me… It’s a chain of events that just spirals. She can’t stand to see that the man she found fairly poetic and extraordinary (Löveborg) the man that really did challenge her, change so drastically. She’s confounded to see Löveborg’s been domesticated and Hedda refuses to be caught in her present situation. That’s what drives her on to do what she does. Hedda is definitely not an inherently malevolent person."
"I guess if I am fighting for anything in what I do when I am on stage, it's to make people understand. It’s hard for any of us to understand why Hedda does what she does, but that we appreciate that she is to a certain degree, driven to what she does. I don’t think this is a sympathetic rendition of the role but I hope it‘s as full of life, that people don’t just dismiss Hedda as crazy because she is far too fascinating to be regarded as simply cold and malevolent.”
Hedda Gabler strikes me as an example of Ibsen’s Revolutions of the Human Mind… like Dr. Stockman in Enemy of the People. She goes through phases. I think she tries everything before her final solution.
"She pushes the limits. No one is a static quantity. They sort of discover by doing how reckless their possibilities are. They don’t really know until they have perhaps gone too far. I think that is there in (Ibsen's) Enemy of the People as well. They are driven by events by an almost pathetic ability. I call it pathetic because it’s so sad and does a great deal of harm to those around them."
Do you think Hedda creates her own web to a certain extent? If she wanted to, she had the strength to get herself out of this mess.
"There is a point where it is just self fulfilling – maybe that’s what audiences feel in the Fourth Act – "Oh God, I can’t be Auntie’s niece, I cannot be Tesman’s possession, I can’t be with Lovebörg because that would bring scandal."
The tragic flaw in Hedda is her cowardice. Were Hedda a liberated woman of today, she would turn around in that moment in Act One when she is looking out at the garden and Tesman comes back in. He says 'What are you looking at' and she would say 'Look, I hate this life, I hate you. I can’t stand this anymore.' But Hedda's pregnant; she needs Tesman's money; she’s terrified of being on the streets and being scandalized. Her father left her with nothing.There’s a real desperation there in this woman who appears so in control but she definitely isn’t, so were it not for her cowardice – she could expose herself to scandal and have at least some satisfaction of her principles, but she can’t do that. She is full of possibility but unable to see it through."
In Part Three of this continuing series Fiona Reid chats about the Hedda's men, her passion for guns and working with actress Sharry Flett, who played Gabler rival Thea Elvsted.
There's more Hedda madness at indyish. And for those who ever wondered what would happen if Hedda could write her own story, check out The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler at Oregon Shakespeare Festival April 15 - Nov 1 2008.
