Word: ibsenism
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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...
That is what Irene Worth is doing, superbly, at this year's Stratford Festival of Canada. At 54, she is as overage for Hedda (Ibsen envisaged her as 29) as a man in his 40s would be for Hamlet. Furthermore, she gives a middle-class Norwegian housewife the unmistakably U manner of an Old Vic grand dame. Thus Stratford audiences may not be exactly getting Ibsen, but they are being treated to one of the best impersonations ever of modern woman in crisis...
Stage Villain. Miss Worth starts with what Ibsen gave her. Eighty years ago, Hedda was a melodramatic innovation; upon her arrival, frigid woman replaced lecherous man as a favorite stage villain. The new fate-worse-than-death, as many playwrights soon realized, was man's castration by this New Woman. Hedda is the sort of female who pushes drinks on a reformed drunkard and burns the only copies of other people's manuscripts. She is, in short, a bitch. Miss Worth knows it, and she takes it from there...
...strings the old lover she never quite had the courage to claim? It is a compassionately balanced mood-portrait of modern woman: boredom at the level of panic, a yawn that comes out a scream. And it is a private masterpiece of Hedda, at least as much Worth as Ibsen...
...does not really matter that Ibsen's well-made play seems less so today or that his men 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...