Centrally concerned with issues of creativity and sexuality, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890) is one of the definitive texts of feminist modernism and has exerted a strong
hold on women’s imaginations from the time of its publication and earliest productions,
such as that of Elizabeth Robins and Marion Lea in London in 1891, through to more
recent productions, such as the 1991 collaboration between Deborah Warner and Fiona
Shaw. As I have noted elsewhere, however, “authorship and authority are linked throughout
Ibsen’s ‘women’s plays,’ so that acts of writing, reading, or—in Hedda’s case—manuscript-burning
serve to
signify the female protagonists’ respective degrees of critical engagement with hegemonic
cultural texts that deny women status as authoritative subjects” (2002 1; 2004 1.)
Given the linkage between writing and patriarchal authority in Western culture that
Ibsen’s “women’s plays” dramatize, adaptations and stagings of Hedda Gabler by women playwrights are of particular interest. In this essay, I will consider how,
in her double-function as adaptor and director of a 1991 production of Hedda Gabler, Canadian playwright Judith Thompson navigated her auteurship of a play by the “father”
of modern drama that is itself at one level about the impossibility of female authorship
and authority.
Thompson rose to prominence in Canadian theatre with her first play, The Crackwalker, which premiered in Toronto in 1980 and has since, along with a number of her subsequent
plays, “achieved … classic status” (Kareda 9) in the canon of Canadian drama. Her
work is generally distinguished by its concern
for what her long-time mentor Urjo Kareda, former artistic director and dramaturg
of the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, described as “the animalistic side within each
of us—the darker, unconscious, libidinous, sometimes
destructive, chaotic dream-world inside” (10).
Thompson’s importance in Canadian theatre history is related to her position as a
woman writer in a cultural context that is, as she herself has recently pointed out,
still dominated by men (2006a 132), but it is also—and as significantly—tied to her
commitment to the postcolonial project
of giving theatrical voice to Canadian experience. These two inter-related strands
of Thompson’s identity as a playwright conjoined to motivate her decision to direct
the first productions of her own work. In her well-known 1992 essay “Why Should a
Playwright Direct her Own Play?” Thompson recalls a formative incident of her early
career as a playwright:
I experienced one writer-director relationship for which the word “colonized” is very
gentle, indeed. I was the Incas and he was Spain. It all started at a preliminary
meeting at my house. He seemed edgy, and he avoided my eyes. When I handed him a rewrite
of a monologue, explaining that I was not a great typist, he tore it up and then threw
the entire bound script at me full force, yelling at me. I screamed the high-pitched
squeal of a six-year-old, and repeated “Get out of my house” like a mantra. He put
his hand on my head, said that I was “a very emotional girl, yes?” and then told me
to sit on the couch and listen to what he had to say. Being a well-trained girl, I
sat on the couch and stared out the window, tears streaming down my face. He paced
up and down my tiny living-room, excoriating me and everyone else in Canadian theatre.
“Would you like to know what I think of Canadian theatre?!” The word “mediocre” flew across the room many times. He told me that the only
reason that he agreed to direct my play is that it is mildly interesting. Then, he
pointed his finger at me and yelled, “If you ever dare to say one word to the actors,
I will kill you. I will kill you, do you understand? I will kill you!!” (54)
During the course of rehearsals, it became clear to Thompson that this director “was
bewildered by the play. He was totally dependent upon me, and soon resorted to
sending the actors out of the room after every scene, and then turning to me. I would
tell him how the scene should be done and then he would bring the actors back and
repeat to them verbatim what I had said” (2006c 54). Following this early experience,
Thompson, who is a graduate of the acting program
at the National Theatre School of Canada and has extensive training in theatre practice,
began to direct her own premieres as, in her words, a way to “discover what, in fact,
my vision is” and “to have a direct line to the actors in order to constantly improve
the text” (2006c 53).
Following her successful staging of her acclaimed play Lion in the Streets at the duMaurier World Stage Theatre Festival and the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto
in 1990, Thompson was invited by artistic director Christopher Newton to direct Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada the following year.
Thompson jumped at this opportunity “to immerse [herself] in [the] play and know it
from the inside out” (Thompson 2006b 101), but, finding the existing English-language
translations inadequate, she only wanted
to direct the play if she could adapt it as well.
Theatre critic Ray Conlogue of The Globe and Mail wrote of the Shaw Festival’s matching of Thompson with Ibsen’s classic text, “The
affinities are clear. Ibsen, like Thompson, views life darkly as an amoral struggle
between those who dominate and those who are victimized.” Conlogue suspected, in fact,
that the Shaw Festival might have been “doing an end-run around its mandate, which
is to produce only writers alive during
Bernard Shaw’s lifetime,” in that having Thompson adapt as well as translate Hedda
Gabler was a way to “smuggle this powerful writer into the festival” (C10).
Conlogue was not alone in seeing a certain logic in the Shaw Festival’s pairing of
Thompson and
Hedda Gabler. In recalling her acceptance of Newton’s invitation, Thompson herself has stated,
“I just knew intuitively that it was right, it was right for me” (Farfan 2007). Indeed,
she believes that
Hedda Gabler “is the kind of thing I might have written if I had been around back then” (qtd.
in Wagner D12), and she has identified several points of connection between Ibsen’s
work and her
own. At the level of content, for example, she has stated,
they’re both, in their time, dangerous, and we want to show what we see to be true…
In a sort of childlike way—a kid saying the emperor has no clothes—we don’t know …
that we might get in some kind of trouble. When I wrote The Crackwalker, I was completely befuddled that people were shocked by it.
(Farfan 2007)
Because of the unsettling truths that both she and Ibsen dramatize, Thompson notes,
their works were “both seminal in a sense, or a turning point of the way drama is
going. His definitely
was in a big global way, and mine was, I know, in a Canadian way” (Farfan 2007).
Thompson also sees a connection between the realism of Ibsen’s prose plays and her
own dramaturgical style, explaining,
I love realism that’s then lifted into not quite Marquez territory, but just a bit.
That’s why my monologues—nobody speaks like that unless they’re in a psychotic break
or something, or at the peak of an emotion. Because to me, my monologues are where
the unconscious meets the conscious life and where the subtext meets the text, because
otherwise it is mostly subtext. And they are arias. And Ibsen has people say—Hedda says what she thinks. Her unconscious does
come to the surface, like, “That’s disgusting leaving that hat on the chair.” (Farfan
2007)
But while Thompson sees similarities between Ibsen’s work and her own, she also recognizes
key differences, particularly in the use of language. As she has stated,
His language was generally, I understand, very simple, even in Norwegian, very spare,
ordinary almost. That’s the big difference, I think. I really choose lush and musical
language, and I tried to sort of maybe impose that a bit on the adaptation. Because
someone—a Norwegian friend of mine …—did say it is more poetic in Norwegian, even though it is very spare and sort of Raymond Carver-esque.
(Farfan 2007)
Thompson’s adaptation of
Hedda Gabler for the Shaw Festival to some extent bridged these perceived differences between
Ibsen’s use of language and her own.
Generally speaking, Thompson “believe[s] that an adaptation of a classic or canonized
work gives a writer the opportunity
to guide the audience in their interaction with the play, to shake the piece until
it is a living text again and to magnify areas of the play that have contemporary
social relevance” (Thompson 2004). In the case of Hedda Gabler, she saw her primary challenge as being to find a way for her 1991 production “to
have an equal impact to the impact that it had” for its original audiences; and, to
her mind, the existing translations, particularly
the Michael Meyer version, were a major obstacle to achieving that impact. “With all
due respect Michael Meyer,” she has stated, “he was very British—it was just so much
of its time. It was just dusty and boring,
incredibly boring.” “I think that to do the Meyer—you’re going to have a really bored—three
quarters of
the audience are falling asleep. But I thought, in my adaptation, I can actually bring
Ibsen’s impact then to now.” Her adaptation was, from her perspective, “all out of love for Ibsen” (Farfan 2007).
She wanted to clear away the “layer of mud” that she felt was obscuring the play in
existing translations and restore to it the
“rhythm and the poetry of natural speech” (Thompson, qtd. in Wagner D12). As Dorothy
Hadfield has written, “By transforming the words authorized by learned translators
into her own words, [Thompson]
hoped to release the spirit of the challenge Hedda Gabler originally represented to traditional theatre practice before canonicity contained
it; to re-energize the original resistant politics that a century of tradition had
enervated and neutralized” (82).
One of the characteristic features of Thompson’s adaptation that is connected to her
commitment to recapturing the impact of the early productions is her elimination of
what Ray Conlogue called “Ibsen’s Victorian delicatesse” (C10). Thus, what Michael
Meyer referred to as a “boudoir” (329) is, in Thompson’s adaptation, a “WHORE house”
(57). Meyer’s Tesman “happened to drop behind for a minute” (305) while seeing Løvborg
home after Judge Brack’s party, but Thompson’s Tesman “fell behind at one point, in
order to.. vomit” (54). Thompson’s Judge Brack does not simply tell Hedda that Løvborg
shot himself “somewhat lower” than the heart, he also “TOUCHES HIS CROTCH” (73); and Thompson’s Hedda finds herself not simply in Brack’s power; but says, “I might
as well be chained to the floor and naked before you, dear Judge. I am a slave” (76).
Beyond eliminating Ibsen’s decorous euphemisms, Thompson darkened the palette of the
play’s imagery and, in doing so, amplified the intensity of Hedda’s reaction to her
surroundings. Thus, Tesman’s slippers look to her “like two old sewer rats run over
by a carriage” (9); Aunt Juliana’s bonnet looks like a “running sore” (10) and a “scab”
(12); and Berthe is an “old scrag” (23). Thea Elvsted’s move from her father’s home
to her husband’s was like going from
“dungeon to dungeon” (17); Hedda fears “jump[ing] off the train” (29), as Brack invites,
because “there are vermin out there” that will “climb up [her] legs” and bite her
(30). Thea is, for Thompson’s Hedda, not “a little idiot” or “a pretty little fool”
(Meyer 299, 315), nor even simply a “mouse,” but a “rodent” (Thompson 1991b 61, 48).
In addition to heightening the degree of explicitness and the intensity and tone of
the imagery, Thompson trimmed Ibsen’s play, condensing it to the point that one of
her collaborators referred to the Shaw Festival production as “Hedda Gabler on rollerblades” (Thompson 2006b 101). She also developed the character of Berthe
into a somewhat comic figure, bluntly
working class, less self-effacing and more direct, and played with a Canadian accent
in the Shaw Festival production. As well, she transformed Thea into a battered wife who is less naïve and more aware of Hedda’s past with Eilert Løvborg and who is murderously angry at her for urging Løvborg to drink.
But perhaps the most striking dimension of Thompson’s approach to Ibsen’s play is
her vision of the underlying causes of Hedda’s behaviour. More specifically, she believes
that Ibsen was dramatizing the effects of sexual abuse without being fully conscious
of what he was doing:
I think he was exploring something enormous and was so far ahead of his time, but,
I think, like Freud, a bit of an innocent. The story is that Freud couldn’t believe
all these Viennese women saying that their fathers were having sex with them. So he
said, well, it must be their fantasy, they must have an unconscious oedipal longing.
It took Jeffrey Masson years later to say no, these fine Viennese doctors were raping
their daughters, it wasn’t longing. (Holloway 136)
In Thompson’s view, the stifling restrictions placed on Hedda as a late-nineteenth-century
upper-middle-class woman and her father’s contradictory double legacy of rebellion
and conventionality (Farfan 2004 74) do not adequately account for the intensity of
her response to Løvborg’s advances:
for her to react that strongly to Løvborg’s sexuality and her own sexuality clearly
means that she had the conflicted reaction that a lot of abused women have … That
ambivalence between desire and repulsion is always present in someone who has been
abused, and … so she’s terrified of her own tremendous animal attraction to Løvborg
and so therefore wants to kill him for it. (Farfan 2007)
Thompson published her theory about Hedda’s sexual abuse by her father in her director’s
notes for the program of the Shaw Festival production (1991a), but she only made a
few textual revisions to actually suggest it. In Act I, for
example, Hedda says to Thea when pressing her for information about her marriage,
“I have secrets … that will go with me to my grave. I am very practised at keeping
secrets” (18). As well, in Act III, when, prior to admitting to having lost the manuscript,
Løvborg
says that “to kill a child isn’t the worst thing a father could do,” Hedda replies,
“I know that” (61). Near the end of the play, when Hedda concedes to Judge Brack,
“I am a slave,” she “(QUIETLY)” adds, “once more” (76). But beyond these occasional
textual hints, Thompson added a prologue that underscored
her view of the significance of Ibsen’s exposition about Hedda’s past rejection of
Løvborg and its connection to her relationship with her father. In this prologue,
Hedda entered the darkened stage in her nightgown, danced alone by candlelight, and
was joined by Løvborg, who tried to make love to her until she threatened him with
her pistol. He left her alone on stage and she fired a blank shot at a bust of her
father before exiting to her bedroom (2). Thompson originally planned a corresponding epilogue in which Hedda and Løvborg were
united in death (78), but this epilogue was cut during the course of the Shaw Festival
rehearsal process.
The reviews of the Shaw Festival production were mixed. Thompson’s adaptation was
admired by Jamie Portman for being “fresh and often provocative” and for its “spare,
compelling, and idiomatic texture” (D4); Lois Chapman noted its “[wedding of] 19th century sensibilities with today’s stringent language”; and Geoff Chapman described
it as “modern and clear, the idioms of today capturing the austere poetry of the Norwegian
writer’s ideas, although Thompson has invented plenty of dramatic imagery to pursue
her view of the mysterious Hedda’s motivations” (D6). Portman, however, dismissed
the prologue as a “pretentious and interminable … mistake” (D4), while Herbert M.
Simpson described it as “ludicrous” and Terry Doran complained that it “create[d]
a long, befuddled pause before the play, Ibsen’s play, truly begins, and
… foolishly telegraph[ed] a few of the main points that lie in waiting” (C5). Although
the acting was generally praised, Ray Conlogue regarded the portrayal of
Berthe as “an exact equivalent of a working-class Canadian woman” as “wrong-headed”
(C10), while other critics found Berthe’s lines “too vernacular” (“Riveting Production”),
her “offhand slang and familiarity … [ringing] falsely for the longstanding maid of
two
elderly sisters with a respect for convention” (Brown D4).
What is perhaps more interesting and significant than this mixed critical response
to Thompson’s adaptation and production was the degree of hostility of the Shaw Festival
company toward her work, despite the fact that the artistic director of the Shaw had
himself invited her participation as one of Canada’s foremost playwrights who had
already twice won the Governor General’s Award, among numerous other prestigious awards
and distinctions. It should be noted as well that her approach to Ibsen’s text, including not only
her heightened language and imagery but also her seemingly idiosyncratic concern for
the issue of sexual abuse, was not inconsistent with what might have been expected
of her, given her previous body of work. Yet Thompson recalled a general lack of support
for her adaptation among company members, whose preference for the Michael Meyer translation
she attributes to “that Canadian, colonialist, colonized attitude—we’re just so culturally
colonized—it’s
something I’ve been fighting against my whole artistic career, and I still see evidence
of it everywhere” (Farfan 2007).
But beyond this general lack of support for her adaptation, Thompson has recalled
an extraordinary incident that seems out of all proportion to the purported provocation
of her textual revisions. In Act III of Meyer’s translation, Løvborg says, “It isn’t
just last night. It’ll go on happening. I know it. But the curse of it is,
I don’t want to live that kind of life. I don’t want to start all that again. She’s
broken my courage. I can’t spit in the eyes of the world any longer” (315). The corresponding
speech in Thompson’s version reads: “Oh, last night was only the beginning, Hedda,
I can feel it, rampaging through me.
I have no….strength..against it..She..has loosed it with her..doubt, her loss of faith”
(61). The following is an account by Thompson of how an ongoing battle with the actor
playing Løvborg in the Shaw Festival production came to a head over this short speech:
These lines … baffled the actor who was being paid to say them. From the first day
of rehearsal this actor had enormous hostility towards the adaptation, viewing it
as a monstrous distortion of Ibsen’s play, which he seemed to think was perfectly
rendered by the existing English translations. Along with one or two others in the
cast, he regarded the clumsy, wooden and decidedly unpoetic extant English translations
as gospel. However, up until this point he had, albeit reluctantly, walked through
my adaptation in rehearsals and tried to “make it work,” as I had been fairly obliging,
reinstating many lines I had, perhaps over-zealously, cut, and patiently explaining
how I had arrived at each word or phrase that differed from the other translations.
But today was different. He would not enter into this pivotal moment of the play;
instead, he glared at me and declared the speech unactable. He said that it made no
sense at all, and that he was not interested in a “wash of emotion.” He emitted fumes
of hatred into the rehearsal room, and I began to find breathing difficult. I tried
to help him with the moment, presenting him with several strong metaphors, all of
which he refused to hear: “No, no, no, no! It doesn’t make sense.” Finally, at breaking point, I told him that I had the perfect
analogy. I, like Lövborg, could feel a “beast rampaging through me” because of his
(the actor’s) lack of faith in me and my adaptation. In fact, what I felt like doing
was putting my head and his through the glass doors. The actor had been in a squatting
position, staring at the floor while I spoke. When I finished, he remained frozen
in that position for a full ten minutes, refusing to answer the stage manager’s queries
about his well-being. Inside, I shattered. This rehearsal process was the most painful
and sickening one I have ever been through, and although the production was wonderful,
and very well received, I doubt I will ever recover from the emotional trauma of directing
it. (2006c 52)
The passage of the adaptation that precipitated this clash of wills was not a particularly
radical departure from Ibsen’s text, and so I asked Thompson in a recent interview
how she accounted for this actor’s behaviour. Linking to my own earlier discussion
of Ibsen’s use of reading and writing as a metaphor for female authority in his plays,
she responded, “I think he didn’t like my authorial authority. He did not like it.
He didn’t like
it that I looked young and my ideas seemed a bit crazy” (Farfan 2007). In her published
account of the incident, chauvinism and colonialism are integrally
linked:
most actors seem to have been habituated to expect a traditionally male kind of authority
figure, a bearded man who knows the play better than any of them, who has the answers
to all their questions and who, preferably, speaks with a British accent. They want
a conqueror, someone who will take their natural resources and build a splendid and
fruitful machine. They do not want someone who is groping in the dark without a sword,
searching for the play. No! They want a man who will show them the light, so that they can crawl out of their chaos and barbarism,
their darkness. The director must have a grand design that the primitives cannot see.
Surely this need of theirs is a perfect example of a hunchbacked colonial mentality,
and I feel most uncomfortable wearing Columbus’s clothing. I, as a writer, never see
a grand design. I am a mole, burrowing underground, bumping into the play. I can understand
why actors might be uncomfortable with that—who wants a blind taxi driver? But I cannot
play “Dad.” (2006c 53)
While Thompson’s comments are, of course, over-generalizations, the internalized paternalistic
colonialism that she encountered in staging
Hedda Gabler might have been especially acute within the Shaw Festival context, particularly given
that she had come to the Shaw from her position as writer-in-residence at the Tarragon
Theatre, which had a distinguished track record of fostering new Canadian plays and
was in that sense the Shaw Festival’s polar opposite in terms of cultural politics.
Not simply a woman writer’s struggle to author her vision of a canonical “woman’s
play” by the “father” of modern drama, Thompson’s production of Hedda Gabler at the Shaw thus situated a postcolonial Canadian writer in a context where postcolonial
critical perspectives on Canadian culture were not a primary concern. Unexpectedly,
then, Ibsen’s classic feminist-modernist “woman’s play” became a site for a postcolonial
writer’s struggle to make her voice heard in a Canadian
theatrical context still dominated by colonialist cultural standards.