Word: lovborg
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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...
...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...
...with a strong masculine component. She identifies with her late father, an army general. She not only cherishes her father's pistols; she uses them, a symbolic and physical annexation of male prerogatives. As a very young woman, Hedda had been a kind of platonic muse to Eilert Lovborg (David Newman), a brilliant but dissolute writer and thinker. Out of temperamental fatigue ("I have danced practically all my life-and I was getting tired . . . My summer was up"), she has married an aunt-coddled pedant named Jorgen Tesman. She has moved from a danger that stirred her inner being...
Hypersensitive Hedda resents Lovborg's success. Once her lover, he has turned to stupid little Mrs. Elvstead, who discusses him maternally with Hedda. Jealous, Hedda makes Lovborg believe that Mrs. Elvstead has lost faith in him. He gets drunk, loses the manuscript of his second book. When he comes to her, Hedda gives him a pistol and the injunction to use it "beautifully." He uses it, not beautifully, and Hedda soon destroys herself...