Hedda Gabler is the story of a woman trapped by marriage, status, and the possibility of scandal. Bored with her husband and stuck in a house she doesn’t want, Gabler remains apathetic and cynical with her situation until an old acquaintance from school pays a visit with news that finally brings something other than the monotony of day-to-day life.
Directed by Brian Richmond, Hedda Gabler takes the ordinarily uneventful and spins it into something more complex. Conversations between the characters often have double meanings, and the motives of each character are not necessarily revealed in obvious statements. The play relies on reading between the lines and the inference of the audience. This style of dialogue can be tricky, as many audiences are unused to such personal deliberation mid-show, but Hedda Gabler manages to convey so much more with what isn’t said rather than what is. And it is very effective.
The story, told mainly through each character’s interactions with Gabler, takes many twists and unexpected routes throughout its duration, and Amanda Lisman, who plays Gabler, handles the emotionality of her character brilliantly. The joy, pain, tedium, and impatience throughout this performance is executed well within both acts.
The acting talent does not end with Lisman: there are excellent casting choices all around, the most notable being Trevor Hinton, who brilliantly executes his role as Gabler’s bookish and slightly eccentric husband, George Tesman. It’s clear that Hinton puts his soul into this character as well as the idea of character foil.
With a cast of nine characters and the setting of a drawing room, there’s a certain intimacy as the audience acts as the fly on the wall to the unfolding events. Both the look and feel of the set illustrate the privacy (or the lack of it) in different scenes between characters, which adds to the metaphor-esque nature of the production.
Although the audience is confined to the drawing room throughout the show, the illusion of depth is created through a translucent screen which acts as both a wall to the study and a canvas for shadow projection—a way to show who’s in the adjacent room and what they’re doing without requiring them to be directly on stage. This visual storytelling adds huge emphasis to the show as well as to the overall aesthetics of the production.
Hedda Gabler
Until Sunday, June 12
$15 student tickets, Roxy Theatre
bluebridgetheatre.ca