Word: tesman
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...other hand, Salovaara treats his character, George Tesman, with appropriate zeal and with particular stress on the comedic. As Salovaara doen't take his character too seriously, his performance is one of the play's funniest...
...crux of Hedda Gabler's discontent, as we vaguely infer from the play's early scenes, has something to do with her recent marriage to the bookish George Tesman (Erik Salovaara). Hedda is not what you would call the Stepford wife type. She gains pleasure from slamming doors, playing loud piano mazurkas, and polishing gun barrels as opposed to silver flatware. As she so matter-of-factly puts it, "I have no talent for such things as responsibilities. I have a talent for only one thing in life--boring myself to death...
...aiming for minimalism, a severe understatement that admirably suits the grim plot. The characters wear black and wander around their comfortable living room (Quincy's unadorned common room) with the same aimless ferocity that characterizes their power games. Hedda (Julie Cohen), newly married to the buffoonish George Tesman (Curt Raffi), is bitter and trapped, seeking to find artistic fulfillment by manipulating the men around her. In the few days that follow her return with Tesman from their honeymoon, Hedda gradually becomes twisted in her own plots, trapped by the circumstances that once made her powerful. The sickening build from complication...
...sudden still pauses are effective at first, but through too much of the play she seems merely to be walking from pose to pose; the intensity that could lead Hedda to destroy men's careers in her quest for "perfect moments" appears only in intermittent flashes. Raffi as Tesman and Linda Gray as Mrs. Elvsted--perhaps the feistiest of Hedda's intended victims--offer even less depth. Raffi in particular, though he seems to have a good grip on the well-meaning naive Tesman, over-emotes so consistently that his voice deteriorates into bleating...
...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...