‘Good God, but people don’t do such things!’
– A HeddaGablerGablerGabler review
If beloved Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is widely regarded as ‘the father of realism’, writer and director Mary Angley might just be ‘the mother of surrealism.’ HeddaGablerGablerGabler – written as a showcase piece during Angley’s time in the Masters of Directing degree at the Victorian College of the Arts – is a scintillating deconstruction of Ibsen’s famous 1891 play through new, unexpected and exciting lenses. In Angley’s play, infamous lady Hamlet Hedda is torn apart and reassembled through the scope of improv, queerness, gender and the indefinable quality of live theatre. I was lucky enough to be at opening night and snag Mary for a chat after the show.
HeddaGablerGablerGabler is hard to define. The play is part recreation, part meta-analysis, part gameshow and part theatrical endurance sport. In the first scene, Hedda is an invisible force mouthed by all three actors: overwhelmingly talented cohort Caithlin O’Loghlen, Emma Jevons and Sarah-Jayde Tracey. As the opening scene sets, though, the games truly begin. Each actor must engage in a trial, including but not limited to:
- stripping off their corsets in record time
- painting their toenails bright red
- throwing and catching an egg with an increasing span of distance between them
- filling up plastic water pistols with tomato juice from their own mouths as it slowly stains their pink silk pyjamas crimson.
And the prize of each trial? The winner gets to play the enigmatic Hedda in the next scene. The mutable and ever-changing nature of the show’s bones means no performance is the same. Each actor brings something new to the role, whether it be Tracey’s supercilious torpor, O’Loghlen’s superb comedic timing or Jevons’ innate fluidity. Each actor made Hedda their own through the sheer determination to be her, to inhabit her. I felt Hedda in the courthouse with us under those neon pink lights; this impervious, mysterious, shadowy effigy whom no one can quite shake.
‘A big thing for me is liveness, the live medium,’ said Angley of the decision to include experimental games in the show. ‘For me, if I’m going to be making theatre, I need to utilise the unique properties of theatre. It’s important to me that it does involve the audience, that it does move the audience through something. I use direct address a lot, and through that palette of ideas, the notion of games and chants and live art started to come to the surface.’
Another big draw of the show was the set and costuming. While the first scene is enacted in historically accurate clothing, the actors soon strip themselves of the fusty trappings and spend the rest of the show in bubblegum pink silk pyjamas. ‘I wanted (Hedda) in pyjamas from the start. I love the idea of Hedda barefoot as a way of conveying that she cannot leave the space. Once I found those pyjamas, I just loved the repetition and campy imagery of them. I also kind of liked how it felt like the actors were playing some messed-up games at a slumber party,’ said Angley. ‘The pyjamas were so abstract and removed from a traditional Hedda but still captured the upper-middle-class boredom and decadence of the time.’ The set was pared back; a few chaises draped in white sheets as a way of conveying Hedda’s recent arrival to the manor house. Through some of the games, juice began to stain the white, leaving great pools of pale red rings beneath each actor; ghosts of shows past. ‘The sheets are getting pretty filthy, but I love the liminality of it all. We wanted it to feel like it both was and wasn’t a piece of history, like lifted out of time.’
Most of all, I loved the focus on queerness and the reversal of gender norms. In one scene, Angley plays with the idea of Hedda’s former lover Ejlert as a woman, thereby delving into the old ‘bury your gays’ trope. ‘We spoke a lot about queer death on stage, and why it’s a predicament. But it also allows us to have our cake and eat it too. Girl Ejlert is sexy, it’s fun, so we got to have this little fantasy: what if we did do queer Hedda but then use the scene to point out why it’s a really bad idea … because it inevitably ends in death?’
In true experimental spirit, when the play soars to its climax and Hedda is standing with the water pistol of tomato juice to her temple, the actor who won the final scene got to choose how it all ended. Do you pull the trigger or walk away? In the end, Jevons was our final Hedda and they chose to leave the story ambiguous. No death, but no answers either. All in all, I was riveted – as was the audience – the entire time. And maybe, just maybe, I finally understand Hedda Gabler like I’ve always wanted to.