Garbled Gabler

By J.C.

HEDDA

Directed and Adapted by TREVOR NUNN

Last year's Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hedda Gabler has been transferred to the screen for reasons that remain mysterious. This is stolid, stilted Ibsen performed by a gallery of waxworks. The movie preserves Glenda Jackson's Hedda for posterity. Posterity has no choice but to accept --but it does not have to be kind.

Jackson's Hedda is nasty and coarse, a kind of anemic succubus. She is choking on her own rage, not fighting against her desperation. There is no sympathy in her. It is impossible to tell why men are so drawn to her. Hedda must be a woman of sensuous deceits. Jackson's is an arch, nearly campy portrayal, full of snarling asides of self-pity. The performance might work in The Little Foxes; here, it looks like parody.

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's bursts of visual inspiration are similarly mechanical. When Hedda, talking to a flirtatious Brack, looks out the window and sees her husband returning home, she reflects with amusement, "The triangle is complete." Nunn cuts to a three-shot, a triangulated composition with Tesman at the apex. That kind of literal-mindedness paralyzes the entire production, although it does demonstrate that the director may have some dormant skills in elementary geometry.

J.C.

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