Word: gablers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...alternate weeks, the course replaces conventional classes with professional performances of excerpts from such plays as O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. Before each 15-to 20-minute performance, the students are briefed by an English professor on the theme of the play and by a psychiatrist on psychological traits to be observed in the characters. Afterward students, faculty and the actors themselves take part in a two-hour discussion...
...Stock-mann, the idealist who heroically fights to improve his community in An Enemy of the People, reappears in The Wild Duck as Gregers Werle, a pre-Freudian busybody who demonstrates that helping people face their problems is often just a bland way of destroying them. Similarly, in Hedda Gabler, Nora, the relatively innocent victim of male chauvinism in A Doll's House, is re-examined as Hedda, a modern woman whose frustrated need to assert individuality transforms her into a "suburban Lady Macbeth...
Another mighty playwright, Ibsen, offers an equivalent role for a woman in Hedda Gabler. The sad thing about the current off-Broadway revival is that the inner life that Claire Bloom brings to it is chilly, prim and pallid. The inner life is extremely important to Hedda, for otherwise what is left is the story of a kind of grown-up "bad seed," a woman who out of casual malice or native bitchiness burns her would-be lover's brilliant manuscript, pushes him back to drink and gives him a pistol with instructions to shoot himself...
...adept at touching the body to ease pain. Playwright Duras is skilled at touching a woman's psyche to expose pain. And love, and loathing-the heart's peopled wound. And a claustrophobically confined intelligence. A Place Without Doors really lies in the land of Hedda Gabler...
...only two offerings of the current London theater do script and staging mesh at a truly first-rate level: Ingmar Bergman's production of Hedda Gabler and Jonathan Miller's of The Merchant of Venice, both for the National Theater. Yet even these are star vehicles, Hedda for Maggie Smith, and Merchant for Laurence Olivier as Shylock (at least until recently when a thrombosis forced him off the stage for three months). In most of London's other notable productions, playwrights and directors more or less suffer stellar eclipses...