A thrilling single hour of psychological drama. Dafna Rubinstein’s modern adaptation, Hedda, is a risk that’s paid off. Bravo.
📍Greenside @ Infirmary Street – Forest Theatre
📅 Aug 18-20, 22-27
🕖 12:30pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 1 hour
👥 Director & Playwright: Dafna Rubinstein after Henrik Ibsen
🎬 Producers: Wonderlabs
💰 From £10.00
🎂 16+
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilet
Wonderlabs modernized, one-act take on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, is in many respects a straight take on the originating narrative. Strip away the mod-cons, the CCTV, the smartphones, and juice blenders, and it remains the story of Hedda (Noa Har-Zion), a young woman in her late 20’s rebelling against the abyss offered her by settled, married, unremarkable life. Said despair has set in almost immediately upon marrying George Tesman (Iftach Ophir), a respectable, if unremarkable mathematician. The play opens with their return from honeymoon, to a new house renovated, and modernised under friend & lawyer Brack (Ben Parry).
The production is ambitious, not only in mounting a full cast play at the Fringe, but in augmenting their staging with a panelled screen in backdrop thanks to Set Designer (Dafna Peretz). It’s a clever device mostly played as the house’s CCTV screens, and thus allows the action to stray outside, whether watching guests arriving, or sojourning out into the garden.
Fortunately that ambition is matched in the fine execution of this vibrant study of a woman brought to psychological fever-pitch by the return of an ex-lover Lovborg (Benny Elder). Once her partner in toxic misadventure, Lovborg is now a recovering alcoholic, worshipped by a married woman, Thea (Sharon Burstein Bichachi), and a mathematical genius. His threat to Hedda’s world is thus absolute, a goad to her own domestic powerlessness, and a potential rival for her husband’s promised tenure at University. When Lovborg’s phone, sole container of code which may change the future, falls into Hedda’s hands, she’s very well placed to make some very destructive choices.
The ‘algorithm on the phone’ is perhaps the only ill-judged modernisation, not least because it’s pretty much impossible, but mostly because it’s just not necessary. Were the Ibsen plot of Tesman & Lovborg being rival writers — and the masterpiece being a manuscript, not a phone — retained it would still work. After all people do still write, and teach literature.
Nonetheless, the cast are uniformly excellent, Har-Zion particularly alive with the febrile energy of a human brought to the brink. Her rage, and despair are writ large across every decision, every action, driving the play forwards to inevitable catastrophe. Ben Perry also deserves mention for his charismatically oily & urbane Brack, the immoral jester to this court of unfortunates.
Dafna Rubinstein has done a fine job in creating a thrilling single hour of psychological drama, from the 2+ hours of the originating text. Some ancillary characters have been cut, or reduced to mention only, and what is lost in texture, is gained in narrative momentum. The dominoes fall fast here, choices and consequences colliding towards chaos, and a final, absolute conclusion. It’s always risky to reimagine a classic, but in this case it’s certainly paid off. Bravo to all.
(Image Credit: Wonderlabs)
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