Word: tesman
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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...
...weak and pedantic husband of 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...
Trevor Nunn, who directed the 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...
Most important of all, Hedda's self-hatred translates into a destructive hatred of others-her academic clod of a husband, George Tesman (Peter Eyre), for example, and her onetime lover, the writer Eilert Luvborg (Patrick Stewart). Her wrath stems from the fact that she has betrayed her own Dionysian will to freedom. She is an older Nora who failed to slam the door on parochialism, co vention and hypocrisy. Jackson reduces all that to the level of cocktail-party sarcasm and suburban jitters...
What is insufferably painful for this Hedda is that she is totally aware of her predicament. She has aimed at the stars and settled for a cinder. Tesman, with his dusty burrowing in book after book, is not a spouse but a sedative. It is to Actor Peter Hansen's credit that he humanizes a library mole so that the audience can accord him the pity that Hedda withholds...