Private Masterpiece

Hedda Gabler has become for actresses what Hamlet has always been for actors. If Hamlet is the classic male neurotic--the man who cannot act--Hedda is the classic female neurotic--the woman who cannot feel. With both roles, the performer does not so much assume a part as submit an interpretation of a fascinating set of symptoms.

That is what Irene Worth is doing, superbly, at this year's Stratford Festival of Canada. At 54, she is as overage for Hedda (Ibsen envisaged her as 29) as a man in his 40s would be for Hamlet. Furthermore, she gives a middle-class Norwegian housewife the unmistakably U manner of an Old Vic grand dame. Thus Stratford audiences may not be exactly getting Ibsen, but they are being treated to one of the best impersonations ever of modern woman in crisis.

Stage Villain. Miss Worth starts with what Ibsen gave her. Eighty years ago, Hedda was a melodramatic innovation; upon her arrival, frigid woman replaced lecherous man as a favorite stage villain. The new fate-worse-than-death, as many playwrights soon realized, was man's castration by this New Woman. Hedda is the sort of female who pushes drinks on a reformed drunkard and burns the only copies of other people's manuscripts. She is, in short, a bitch. Miss Worth knows it, and she takes it from there.

She walks the arena stage in twisting little circles, like a caged animal. Not a really wild animal, but a poorly domesticated one--petulant rather than fierce, caught in a thicket of heavy-legged furniture. At one moment of electric outrage, she turns her back to the audience, raises clenched fists to heaven like Antigone, then slowly lowers them to her neck, like just another housewife with just another nagging backache. In this magnificent little cycle of rebellion and surrender, Miss Worth defines her theme: trapped impotence.

Beyond the simple wickedness of war between the sexes, Miss Worth offers the far more terrifying predicament of a woman at war with herself. Her Hedda has replaced duty to others with the new, disguised puritanism of self-fulfillment: duty to oneself. She wants to do her own thing, if only she knew what it was. Push her bumbling academic husband into politics? Take on a new lover? Or pull back onto her puppet strings the old lover she never quite had the courage to claim? It is a compassionately balanced mood-portrait of modern woman: boredom at the level of panic, a yawn that comes out a scream. And it is a private masterpiece of Hedda, at least as much Worth as Ibsen.

It does not really matter that Ibsen's well-made play seems less so today or that his men appear flattened even before his women get to them. Miss Worth survives the limitations of her script, which makes her a good actress, and her own limitations as well, which may make her a great actress. Her final achievement is persuading the audience to think of Hedda Gabler not only as modern woman but as modern human being--that disordered creature of either sex whose tragedy is to need love all the more for not being able to offer it.

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