When Henrik Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, after spending 27 years living abroad, he returned as a giant of theatre – his plays such as A Doll’s House, Ghosts and Hedda Gabler had both shocked and reinvigorated 19th-century theatre.
Towards the end of his life, he was famous enough that his apartment in Oslo would draw adoring fans, gazing up at the windows, hoping to glimpse the man dubbed “the father of the modern theatre”.
That street has since been renamed “Henrik Ibsens gate”, and his sumptuous flat preserved as a museum.
I visited this rather grand address recently, with its views across a wide boulevard onto one of Oslo’s elegant city parks; it was easy to imagine Ibsen, sitting on his plush green velvet furniture or at the heavy desk in the window, writing busily or fiddling with his “devil’s orchestra” of quirky little figurines kept on hand for moments of writer’s block.
His routine involved writing every morning before downing tools and parading past the nearby Royal Palace and the National Theatre on his way to the Grand Café for lunch, a beer and a cognac. The predictability of this daily ritual meant that fans tended to follow him there, too.
Ibsen’s celebrity has endured in the 117 years since his death; he is the world’s most-produced playwright after Shakespeare and, in Britain, we still can’t seem to get enough of him.
A West End production of An Enemy of the People starring Matt Smith has just been announced, while this month a bold new version of Hedda Gabler starring Antonia Thomas (Lovesick, Still Up) opens in London, at the Rose Theatre Kingston.
His plays – well-made, naturalistic and usually emotionally devastating – expose how hypocrisies and secrets, injustices and inequalities may infect romantic relationships, ripple down generations within families and trouble the very structure of society.
“There’s such remarkable love for Ibsen out there in the world – but in Norway we need to be reminded all the time,” says Kåre Conradi, an actor who, in 2012, founded The Norwegian Ibsen Company (NIC) with exactly this aim in mind.
Having worked in the UK, Conradi was struck by how anything to do with Shakespeare was preserved and celebrated, and that we had dedicated theatres for his work, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe.
Conradi is concerned Norway takes Ibsen for granted: I’m shown a new theatre in the basement of the Ibsen Museum sitting empty, because there’s no funding for shows, and another atmospheric, partially-preserved flat he lived in, that is at risk of being turned into a hotel.
But as well as reminding fellow Norwegians “why Ibsen is important”, the NIC is also about cultural exchange: it has toured bilingual productions internationally and is open to radical reimaginings of Ibsen, not just reverential museum pieces.
Indeed, the NIC is the co-producer for Shooting Hedda Gabler at The Rose, a contemporary version of Hedda Gabler by Nina Segal. First performed in 1891, Ibsen’s original is set within well-educated, convention-bound Oslo polite society – to which Hedda returns after her honeymoon, already bored and frustrated with her husband and her new life.
It’s not long before she’s manipulating those around her in order to try to assert some power – but, ultimately, this is a game she cannot win. Hedda comes to feel so trapped by her shameful secrets, her marriage and her stuck place in society that she kills herself.
Segal has reframed the play to look at a woman struggling with the pressures of fame – something Conradi believes Ibsen would have been fascinated by if he were alive today.
“He would have been there first with [writing about] the #MeToo movement,” he suggests. “She [Segal] has managed to draw all the layers into something new – it’s funny, it’s dark, it has depth. It’s sexy as well.”
Her central Hedda-like heroine is a former Hollywood child star, who went off the rails and is trying to rehabilitate her image by filming a high-brow adaptation of Hedda Gabler in Norway – where a manipulative director, Henrik (wink-wink), pushes her to dangerous extremes.
It’s a smart way to update it – because while Western women today obviously aren’t as trapped by societal expectation as they once were, when it comes to living in the public eye, the question of “reputation” is still very much alive.
A movie star can be highly privileged, yet also locked in the gilded cage of her own celebrity, the press and public judging her every move. And a film set works as a location where rigid and often misogynistic hierarchies of power still exist – where the male director calls the shots, quite literally.
But when she was first asked to adapt the play, Segal found herself grimly fascinated with why, exactly, Hedda Gabler remains one of Ibsen’s most famous and most performed plays. “Why do we – as an audience, as a culture – like this story so much? It’s a story about a woman being destroyed!”
She points out that society often seems to take perverse pleasure in both watching a woman behave badly and then seeing that woman punished for it. One inspiration for her update was the image of paparazzi hounding Britney Spears as she shaved her head – a symbol of her trying to control her own image, in the middle of a mental breakdown.
Segal hopes her new version will interrogate the question of why we are continually drawn to narratives about women being destroyed, whether that is via celebrity gossip mags or in esteemed theatres.
It certainly seems that we just can’t quit Hedda Gabler. A major new movie version is currently in the works – directed by Nia DaCosta, the first black woman to top the US film charts with Candyman, and starring Tessa Thompson.
It’s far from the first filmed version: no lesser talents than Glenda Jackson, Diana Rigg and Ingrid Bergman have played Hedda on screen over the years, while Maggie Smith, Isabelle Huppert, Cate Blanchett and Ruth Wilson have all scaled the part on stage.
On a practical level, the play’s continuing popularity can be partly explained by the fact that Hedda, as a role, is very popular with actresses themselves – Ibsen wrote brilliant, complex, flawed women, and actresses still clamour to play them.
“There are not many plays that have massive roles for women at their heart,” points out Christopher Haydon, the artistic director of The Rose. “Leading roles for women in their 30s and 40s are still really rare.”
But it seems Hedda is catnip to adapters too – playwrights can’t resist a radical rewrite. This spring, we had a queer updating by Harriet Madeley, starring Anna Popplewell; last summer Kristin Winters’ Ghislaine/Gabler spliced Ibsen’s anti-heroine with Ghislaine Maxwell in a one-woman Edinburgh show, and, in 2019, in Hedda Tesman playwright Cordelia Lynn imagined a middle-aged Hedda for the touring company Headlong.
Whis is this play so endlessly reinventable, then? For Segal, it’s partly that Ibsen – a man who knew what it meant to be in the public eye and highly scrutinised – was attuned to the ways in which we’re all performing. “That felt really key in Ibsen’s original – Hedda is pretending,” she says. “Hedda Gabler is a character even to herself.”
This idea of performing our selves feels just as relevant in the 2020s as it did in the 1890s, even if now we’re using social media rather than staring up at people’s windows…
Conradi takes a slightly more soulful view. “I think it’s about loneliness,” he says. “Ibsen recognised that in a lot of the female characters – the loneliness of being surrounded by people who want a piece of you, but don’t really see you.”
I can’t help but think, as I move around Ibsen’s flat, how that is something its occupant must have been familiar with too – while the space is busy with gilt-framed mirrors, grand chandeliers and the sort of intricately-wrought golden furniture that seems to speak of a life spent entertaining the great and the good, Ibsen was apparently strict about shutting the door to his study and keeping out the world when he needed to write.
And behind closed doors, he wrote those great and enduring plays – plays that were all about seeing people for who they really were and speaking the truth about them. It got him in trouble during the time he was writing, winning him public criticism and outraged reviews – but it also ensured his plays have lasted.
“He was always slightly ahead of his time,” says Conradi. “He can see who we are as human beings more than we can see ourselves.”
Shooting Hedda Gabler is at the Rose Theatre, Kingston from 29 September to 21 October rosetheatre.org
