Word: gablers
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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...
...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...
...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...