CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
ne commis pas de sentiment plus mbar- rassant que !'admiration. Par la difficulte de s'exprimer convenablement elle resemble
l'amour.' Thus Baudelaire, who for his sins wrote a column of art criticism in a review. How right he was. After months spent in watching the trivial melodramas and unfunny farces written by illiter.te authors and played by incompetent actors which abound on the contemporary West End stage, there is something discon:erting as well as refreshing in being faced with a serious play impeccably produced and acted. The present production of Hedda Gabler at the Lyric, Hammersmith, is such a one, but how to convey in terms at once convincing and unemotional the fact that this is a most gripping theatrical experience? The language of praise has suffered a sad decline recently: to compare a modern dramatic critic with, for instance, Shaw, is to realise how far hyperbole has been abused and just severity depreciated in the past fifty years. The trouble with us is that we have nothing to sell, no ideas. But this is a digression.
Hedda Gabler, which Ibsen finished in 1890, is not, of course, his best play. it falls between two stools; on the one hand . its realism (Norwegian small-town life) harks back to plays like The Pillars of Society, while, on the other, it has a tendency to take off into the pure symbolism of his final period. When, immediately after the news of Eilert Lovborg's suicide, Tesman and Mrs. Elvsted sit down to edit the frag- mentary notes of his own work which Hedda burned, this behaviour on the part of a woman who loved Lovborg is quite incredible from the realistic stand-point, though obvi- ously meant to symbolise the future close association of Tesman and Mrs. Elvsted, an association which will, no doubt, ripen into a happy marriage. Two opposing conventions, in fact, rule the play; the symbolism, even when it arises naturally out of the realistic situation, often appears strained. As com- pared with the use made of it in The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler's pistols and Lovborg's magnum opus seem clumsy devices. More- over, the timing of the play reveals serious faults in its construction: the last act is too inevitable and is felt as an anticlimax. The true crisis comes at the end of the second act and the same degree of intensity is never reached again. The spectator has a sudden strange impression of the play's being fore- shortened, of a change in perspective which, in the last act, carries the characters out of their three-dimensional, world into a more distant land of forms and silhouettes. The strength of symbolism is in proportion to the constancy of its use, and the sudden introduc- tion of it in unadulterated doses during the final act throws the play out of shape, though the probable intention of the author was to supply by this means the interest whichtwas lacking in the pure development of a plot, whose data had already been established in the previous acts.
Fortunately, the play is held together by the figure of Hedda Gabler herself, and it is on our feelings about her that its effect will depend. What are we to make of this
idealist, half-Messalina and half-Suffragette, ridiculous and terrible in turn, incapable of humr.n affection, yet driven forward by a passionate romanticism and mythomania which leads her to immolate those around her on the icy altar of some incommunicable ideal? Of course, she is Madame Bovary. Love was an invention of the twelfth century; it was left to the nineteenth to invent boredom and the discovery which was made almost simultaneously by Flaubert and Baudelaire is behind Ibsen's conception of Hedda. Her romanticism consists in being permanently unsatisfied. She is capable of that concentration on the object which would enable her to feel real affection, and it is irony an rony that she, having all or no desires (which comes to the same thing), should be trapp:d by the small-town Don Juan, Brack, who desires her in the most concrete way possible. Hedda Gabler is an ancestress of all the shabby viragos who claim the right to 'a life of their own.' Her greatness —she is greater than the Bovary—comes from her self-consciousness, from her knowledge of what she is doing. There are plenty of women who make life hell for all around, but Hedda is as superior to them as the Marquis de Sade is to the common run of sadists. And this superiority of know- ledge is, properly speaking, diabolical.
It is, therefore, essential to the playing of Hedda, that the actress in question should give a certain detachment to the part. Peggy Ashcroft's achievement in this production is to do so without losing any of the force behind it. The moment when Hedda deliber- ately mistakes Aunt Julia's hat for the maid's (which is a shocking moment, difficult to play without falling into the ridiculous) was carried by her with a fine carelessness of insult; she was simultaneously aloof and passionately malicious, great and petty. And this contrast led her to extract from the part all its underlying comedy, a comedy which is inherent, not so much in Hedda's relations with other people, as in her own character and its contradictions. When she cries 'Did he have vine-leaves in his hair?' the question with its sloppy romanticism and rather horrible basic significance is both terrible and ludicrous. In this very consider- able performance, Miss Ashcroft sacrifices none of the elements in her complex part. She acts with her whole body and her speaking of the lines is a joy to hear—very unlike all too many actresses these days.
To her Micheal Mac Liammoir's Brack and George Devine's Tesman make admir- able foils—the one on the sinister and the other on the comic side of her playing. Mr. Mac Liammoir struck a deeper note with Brack than is usually done and l am not sure that he did not make of this rather scoundrelly lawyer too impressive a figure. Mr. Devine, on the other hand, was just right for Tesman. While being as bumbling as the part demands, he also managed to convey (what I believe Ibsen intended) that Tesman was probably rather a good scholar. Peter Ashmore's production moved swiftly and smoothly In spite of the difficult grouping problem presented by the second and third acts. Of course, it was Miss Ashcroft's evening, but that it was lbsen's as well is a tribute to the production as a whole.
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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