Word: gablers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lights go down, the audience at London's Cambridge Theater looks up expecting to see the familiar opening scene of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler -Hedda's new husband nattering away with his auntie. Instead, in a startling departure from the script, Maggie Smith as Hedda strides silently onto the empty stage. Clad severely in white, she is pale and tense, her features a mask of mortal exhaustion and despair that might have been painted by Edvard Munch. She smokes, paces, contemplates herself in a mirror, stares moodily, doubles over in a spasm of nausea...
...Hedda Gabler has become for actresses what Hamlet has always been for actors. If Hamlet is the classic male neurotic-the man who cannot act-Hedda is the classic female neurotic-the woman who cannot feel. With both roles, the performer does not so much assume a part as submit an interpretation of a fascinating set of symptoms...
...appear flattened even before his women get to them. Miss Worth survives the limitations of her script, which makes her a good actress, and her own limitations as well, which may make her a great actress. Her final achievement is persuading the audience to think of Hedda Gabler not only as modern woman but as modern human being-that disordered creature of either sex whose tragedy is to need love all the more for not being able to offer...
...Angeles run that it has one actress on its roster with the special authority of a star, Maggie Smith. As Masha, flinging herself into the brief, doomed adulterous affair with Colonel Vershinin (Robert Stephens), she is the incandescent epitome of all women in love. Here is a Hedda Gabler of a Russian provincial town, a woman of fire, intelligence, gravity and spirit, married to a bureaucratic paper clip of a man who bores her to headaches rather than tears. Impelled to passion with a man who must leave her, she conveys a heartrending gallantry. Perhaps the saddest fate...