Gabler by Bergman

By * Christopher Porterfield

As the lights go down, the audience at London's Cambridge Theater looks up expecting to see the familiar opening scene of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler --Hedda's new husband nattering away with his auntie. Instead, in a startling departure from the script, Maggie Smith as Hedda strides silently onto the empty stage. Clad severely in white, she is pale and tense, her features a mask of mortal exhaustion and despair that might have been painted by Edvard Munch. She smokes, paces, contemplates herself in a mirror, stares moodily, doubles over in a spasm of nausea. All of the contradictory qualities that are to make up her mordantly gripping performance she foreshadows in mime: hauteur and anxiety, narcissism and feelings of revulsion toward her femininity, commanding energy and naked vulnerability. In overture and miniature the theme has been inexorably set. What follows is inescapably colored by the fact that the audience has already been given a glimpse into Hedda's doomed soul.

This dreamlike visual overture is a stroke worthy of that renowned master of the cinematic art, Ingmar Bergman. And no wonder. The Hedda unveiled by the National Theater troupe last week is a special restaging by Bergman of his 1968 Stockholm production. In it, the play moves out of the sitting room and into the psyche. Bergman's stage is relatively bare and expressionistic, luridly lit when it is not dark. On the peripheries of many of his scenes, characters who are supposed to be offstage linger to eavesdrop on the proceedings that concern them. Somewhat eerily, this shifts the emphasis from actual events to the manner in which they are apprehended by the characters; above all, to the way they are apprehended by Hedda, who overhears far more than anyone else. At times the drama even seems to be taking place in different levels of her mind.

Compulsive Personality. Thus the problem of the play does not appear to be, as it does in many productions, the anti-feminist social conventions that confine Hedda. This Hedda would be no happier if she ran a company or broke out of her marriage. She is a victim not of society but of herself. She still flails viciously at the lives around her, but only in the throes of a long, vivid, tormented and inevitably losing struggle with her own divided nature.

Maggie Smith plays Hedda as a literally compulsive personality, icily aware and occasionally appalled by what she says and does, but helpless to stop herself. When she reaches out to pull the hair of her rival or burn the manuscript of the man she loves, her body lurches and twists in a jumble of conflicting drives to do the thing, not do it, and dissemble by doing something else. Her pale, strained face is a screen on which the shadow of one inner demon masters another, only to be mastered by a third. In keeping with the cinematically fluid rhythms of the production, Miss Smith cuts and dissolves from mood to mood like some dazzling montage sequence in a Bergman film. The wonder of it is that this is not a film, but stage art transmuted to a new dimension.

Originality must be purchased, artistically speaking. For Bergman, the cost of replacing the traditional Victorian furnishings with a more symbolic setting is a tendency toward abstractness. For Miss Smith, the cost of replacing the outwardly thwarted new woman of Hedda's day with a more inwardly racked characterization is a slight taint of the clinical case history. But both transactions are bargains. In place of Ibsen's now somewhat dated "modernity," Bergman's and Miss Smith's theatricality seems timelessly contemporary.

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