Henrik Ibsen
Hedda Gabler
From the Introduction
By William Archer
From Munich on November 20, 1890 Ibsen wrote to his French
translator, Count Prozor:
“My new play is finished; the manuscript went off to
Copenhagen the day before yesterday… It produces a curious feeling of emptiness
to be thus suddenly separated from a work, which has occupied one’s time and
thoughts for several months, to the exclusion of all else. But it is a good
thing, too, to have done with it. The constant intercourse with the fictitious
personages was beginning to make me quite nervous.”
To the same correspondent he wrote on December 4:
“The title of the play is Hedda Gabler. My intention in
giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda, as a personality, is to be
regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife. It was not
my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I principally
wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies,
upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles of the
present day.”
Hedda Gabler was published in Copenhagen on December 16,
1890. This was the first of Ibsen’s plays to be translated from proof sheets
and published in England and America almost simultaneously with its first
appearance in Scandinavia. The earliest theatrical performance took place at
the Residenz Theater, Munich, on the last day of January 1891. Not until
February 26 was the play given for the first time in Norway, where it has
always ranked among Ibsen’s most popular works. The production of the play at
the Vaudeville Theatre, London, April 20, 1891, may rank as the second great
step towards the popularization of Ibsen in England, the first being the
production of A Doll’s House in 1889, which play it has subsequently come to
rival in worldwide popularity. It has been suggested that Ibsen deliberately
conceived Hedda Gabler as an ‘international’ play, and that the scene is really
the ‘west end’ of any European city. To me it seems quite clear that Ibsen had
Christiania (later called Oslo) in mind, and the Christiania of a somewhat
earlier period than the ‘nineties. The electric cars, telephones and other
conspicuous factors in the life of a modern capital are notably absent from the
play. There is no electric light in Secretary Falk’s villa. It is still the
habit for ladies to return on foot from evening parties, with gallant swains
escorting them. This ‘suburban-ism’, which so distressed the London critics of
1891, was characteristic of the Christiania Ibsen himself had known in the
‘sixties rather than of the greatly extended and modernized city of the end of
the century. Moreover Lovborg’s allusions to the fiord, and the suggested
picture of Sheriff Elvsted, his family and his avocations, are all
distinctively Norwegian. The truth seems to be very simple – the environment
and the subsidiary personages are all thoroughly national, but Hedda herself is
an ‘international’ type, a product of civilization by no means peculiar to
Norway.
We cannot point to any individual model or models that ‘sat
to’ Ibsen for the character of Hedda. But the fact is that in this, as in all
other instances, the word ‘model’ must be taken in a very different sense from
that in which
it is commonly used in painting. Ibsen undoubtedly used
models for this trait and that, but never for a whole figure. If his characters
can be called portraits at all, they are composite portraits. Even when it
seems pretty clear that the initial impulse towards the creation of a
particular character came from some individual, the original figure is entirely
transmuted in the process of harmonization with the dramatic scheme. We need
not, therefore, look for a definite prototype of Hedda; but two of that lady’s
exploits were probably suggested by the anecdotic history of the day.
Ibsen had no doubt heard how the wife of a well-known
Norwegian composer, in a fit of raging jealousy excited by her husband’s
prolonged absence from home, burnt the manuscript of a symphony which he had
just finished.
Again, a still more painful incident probably came to his
knowledge about the same time. A beautiful and very intellectual woman was
married to a well-known man who had been addicted to drink, but had entirely
conquered the vice. One day a mad whim seized her to put his self-mastery and
her power over him to the test. As it happened to be his birthday, she rolled
into his study a small keg of brandy, and then withdrew. She returned some time
afterwards to find that he had broached the keg, and lay insensible on the
floor. In these two anecdotes we cannot but recognize the germ, not only of
Hedda’s temptation of Lovborg, and the burning of his manuscript, but of a
large part of her character.
Out of small and scattered pieces of reality Ibsen fashioned
his close-knit and profoundly thought-out works of art.
Of all Ibsen’s works, Hedda Gabler is the most detached, the
most objective –
a character-study pure and simple. It is impossible – or so
it seems to me – to extract any sort of general idea from it. One cannot even
call it a satire, unless one is prepared to apply that term to the record of a
‘case’ in a work of criminology. Reverting to Dumas’s dictum that a play should
contain “a painting, a judgment, an ideal”, we may say that Hedda Gabler
fulfils only the first of these requirements. The poet does not even pass
judgment on his heroine: he simply paints her full-length portrait with
scientific impassivity. But what a portrait! How searching in insight, how
brilliant in coloring, how rich in detail! (Grant Allen’s remark, above quoted,
was, of course, a whimsical exaggeration); the Hedda type is, mercifully, not
so common as all that, else the world would quickly come to an end! But particular
traits and tendencies of the Hedda type are very common in modern life, and not
only among women. Hyperaesthesia lies at the root of her tragedy. With a keenly
critical, relentlessly solvent intelligence, she combines a morbid shrinking
from all the gross and prosaic detail of the sensual life. She has nothing to
take her out of herself – not a single intellectual interest or moral enthusiasm.
She cherishes, in a languid way, a petty social ambition; and even that she
finds obstructed and baffled. At the same time she learns that another woman
has had the courage to love and venture all, where she, in her cowardice, only
hankered and refrained. Her malign egoism rises up uncontrolled, and calls to
its aid her quick and subtle intellect. She ruins the other woman’s happiness,
but in doing so incurs a danger from which her sense of personal dignity
revolts. Life has no such charm for her that she cares to purchase it at the
cost of squalid humiliation and self-contempt. The good and the bad in her
alike impel her to have done with it all; and a pistol-shot ends what is surely
one of the most poignant character-tragedies in literature. Ibsen’s brain never
worked at higher pressure than in the conception and adjustment of those
“crowded hours” in which Hedda, tangled in the web of Will and Circumstance,
struggles on until she is too weary to struggle any more.
Notes by Sheridan Morley
The Cast of Hedda Gabler
Hedda Gabler Juliet
Stevenson
George Tesman Michael
Maloney
Judge Brack Philip Voss
Mrs. Elvsted Emma
Fielding
Lovborg Robert
Glenister
Aunt Juliana Brenda
Kaye
Berta Melinda
Walker
Director John
Tydeman
Producer Nicolas
Soames
Studio Manager Peter
Novis
Recording Engineer Mike
Etherden
JULIET STEVENSON has worked extensively for the Royal
Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. She won an Olivier Award
for her role in Death and the Maiden at the Royal Court, and a number of other
awards for her work in the film Truly, Madly, Deeply. Other film credits
include The Trial, Drowning by Numbers and Emma.
MICHAEL MALONEY’s many Shakespearean roles on the London
stage include Edgar in King Lear, the title roles in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet,
Prince Hal in Henry IV Parts 1 & 2; on film he has appeared in Branagh’s
productions of Hamlet and Henry V, as well as in Parker’s Othello. Other
notable films include Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply. He frequently performs
on radio and TV.
PHILIP VOSS is an associate of the Royal Shakespeare
Company. The roles he has played for that company include Prospero, Malvolio
and Shylock. On film he has appeared in Alive and Kicking, Four Weddings and a
Funeral, Octopussy and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. He plays the
Lord of the Nazgul in the BBC recording of The Lord of the Rings.
EMMA FIELDING trained at RSAMD. She has worked for the Royal
National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, most notably in John Ford’s
The Broken Heart, for which she won the Dame Peggy Ashcroft Award for Best
Actress and the Ian Charleson Award. She has also appeared in numerous radio
plays for the BBC and performed the parts of Desdemona in Othello, Ophelia in
Hamlet and the title role in Lady Windermere’s Fan, as well as many readings
for Naxos AudioBooks.
ROBERT GLENISTER’s varied theater credits include Measure
for Measure, The Tempest and Little Eyolf for the Royal Shakespeare Company;
The Duchess of Malfi, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead and Hamlet. His
television credits include Heartbeat, Midsomer Murders, A Touch of Frost,
Bramwell, Prime Suspect, Only Fools & Horses and Soldier Soldier.
BRENDA KAYE trained at the Central School of Speech and
Drama. Her extensive repertory experience includes Sheffield Playhouse,
Liverpool Playhouse and Bristol Old Vic. For the Royal National Theatre: Hamlet
and Plunder. West End credits include Night Must Fall for Theatre Royal,
Haymarket. She is a former member of BBC Radio Drama Company with over 200
broadcasts including The Woman’s Hour Serial, Poetry Please and With Great
Pleasure.
MELINDA WALKER has performed in countless radio plays and
theater nationally. As well as narrating television documentaries, she was the
voice of the daily quiz show 100% Gold. She devises and performs poetry and
song events, and read in a commemorative edition of Radio 4’s Something
Understood for the Princess of Wales. Melinda writes for the theater with her
husband.
JOHN TYDEMAN played a key role in BBC radio drama for nearly
four decades, as producer, Assistant Head and then Head of Radio Drama. During
that time he directed most of the major plays in the classical repertory, from
Greek drama to Shakespeare, Chekhov and Shaw. He was also active in
contemporary theater, directing works by Osborne, Stoppard, Albee, Pinter and
many others. Directing for television and the stage has been a regular feature
throughout his busy career.