Word: lovborg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Though Hedda always occupies the play's center, Ibsen's profound insight and tight structure integrate the other characters as complex personalities in their own right. There is Hedda's bumbling, self-important husband George Tesman; his well-meaning spinster aunt; the gifted and unbalanced Eilert Lovborg; the parasitically devoted Thea Elvsted Hedda's rival as Lovborg's muse; and the suave dissolute Judge Brack, whose cynical attempt to blackmail Hedda precipitates her defiant suicide...
...convenience whom Hedda has come to despise, David Edelstein delivers a performance of convincing contrast to Aquino. His smaller stature reflects a personality of petty dimensions, and he plays it with the right touch of insecure eagerness and earnest naivete. Tesman's pride is his books, his major tension Lovborg's intellectual competition and his own half-admitted jealousy--a myopic outlook that leaves little room for his smothered wife...
...other hand, Stephen Toope is badly miscast as Eilert Lovborg. Ibsen clearly intended to represent Lovborg as a figure of undisciplined genius, a man whose capacity for passion, even if manifested in debauchery, contrasts alluringly with Tesman's effete conventionality. Yet in this performance Hedda displays no more respect for Lovborg than for anyone else, a major misinterpretation but understandable in view of Toope's characterization. His Lovborg is weak, sulky, and scarcely more worthy of Hedda's interest than Tesman. His only intensity comes in response to Hedda's baiting, and he conveys it as a kind of impotent...
...stage production, moves it in front of the cameras with all the care of a fussy kid transporting a dollhouse. He treats his actors similarly. Peter Eyre as Tesman, the scholarly husband Hedda holds in contempt; Timothy West as Brack, a local magistrate of flexible morality; Patrick Stewart as Lovborg, a raucous genius and former lover of Hedda's; and Jennie Linden as a woman who idolizes him and stirs Hedda's jealousy-all are like windup toys that can be counted on to repeat the same tricks over and over. Nunn's bursts of visual inspiration...
...rest of the cast, only Donald Madden as Eilert Lovborg, Hedda's prime target (apart from herself), achieves true Ibsenite intensity and anguish. In a profoundly moving scene he tells of losing his manuscript in the way that a carousing father might lose all track of a child and who, coming home, says to the mother, "I lost the child-completely lost him. God knows who's got hold of him." After giving an animal cry, Madden opens his mouth again in a terrible soundless scream and sags lifelessly, like a crucified soul. That is an epiphany...