Hedda (Orange Tree, Richmond)
Verdict: New spin on an old classic
Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, daughter of a general, wife of a nobody, is a creature of her times (1890), curbed and constrained by corsets, propriety, patriarchy, too little money and a total lack of imagination.
Tanika Gupta’s inspired new take adds another layer of confinement — endemic racism — to deftly ratchet up the tension.
Relocating the play to 1948, Pearl Chanda’s Hedda is a dark-eyed, sharp-tongued, imperious beauty, former star of the silver screen who has abandoned Hollywood, married an unsuccessful movie director, George Tesman (Joe Bannister), and settled in London’s Chelsea. Where she has nothing to do but play with her father’s pistols and other people’s lives, while ordering her sari-clad maid to keep the drapes drawn so that no one sees too much. So what is she hiding?
Layers and layers of secrets and lies which, little by little, leak out. For, like Merle Oberon, Anglo-Indian Hedda has passed as white.
Woman with a past: Hedda (Pearl Chanda) and her husband George (Joe Bannister) in the Orange Tree’s new production of Ibsen’s great play
In the bad old days (up until 1968), under the Hays Code, Hollywood policed race and relationships, forbidding ‘miscegenation’ and preventing actors of colour from playing anything other than servants and villains.
When former pilot ace turned screenwriter Lenny, a ‘half-caste’ she knew as a child in India and later her lover, arrives in London with a script inspired by Hedda’s own experience, Hedda panics.
In Hettie MacDonald’s claustrophobic staging, Chanda is mesmerising, her eyes icy yet burning, every gesture is deliberate, as if she is still in the spotlight playing a prescribed role, with her maid, Shona (Rina Fatania, formidable and bitter), acting as her accomplice.
Secrets and lies: Hedda (Pearl Chanda) with her ayah Shona (Rina Fatania), who is also her mother…and her minder
Shona claims to have been Hedda’s ayah from birth. Another lie and another ugly, cruel twist. For Shona is actually Hedda’s mother, and now her minder, ever ready with white powder for her cheeks and all too eager to remind her that she is ‘marked…reveal who you are and your legacy will be destroyed!’
As she says, the British went to India, ‘had their fun and we are what was left behind’: despised on the subcontinent and never accepted by the British.
I suspect Ibsen would have been impressed. A fresh new spin on an old classic.
Hedda runs at the Orange Tree until November 22.