Ibsen's Women

Cate Blanchett as Hedda Gabler in the Sydney Theatre Company production in 2004.

By Elissa Blake

In the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, on December 21, 1879, at the climax of a new play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, the actress Betty Hennings slammed a door and exited the stage. The bang it made has echoed ever since.

The stunned opening night audience for Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was the first to experience what has become the most famous stage exit in modern drama: that of Nora Helmer, who walks out on her marriage, her children and on a life defined and directed by men. “All Scandinavia rang with Nora’s ‘declaration of independence’,” wrote the English critic Edmund Gosse. “People left the theatre, night after night, pale with excitement, arguing, quarrelling, challenging.”

Ten years later, another of Ibsen’s women, Hedda Gabler, left theatregoers reeling with the sound of an even bigger bang – that of the revolver with which she takes her own life.

In three productions poised to open in coming weeks, Sydney audiences will have an opportunity to assess Ibsen’s shock tactics for themselves.

An adapted version of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, director by Adena Jacobs and starring a male actor, Ash Flanders, in the title role, opens at Belvoir on July 2. Sport for Jove, best known for its outdoor Shakespeare productions, will offer a period-set staging of A Doll’s House at the Seymour Centre from July 17, directed by Adam Cook and starring Matilda Ridgway. In August, Belvoir will premier Nora, a new work inspired by A Doll’s House, which follows Nora, played by Blazey Best, out the door.

Examining the lives of middle class married women in ways never seen before, A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler shocked their Victorian-era viewers with their criticisms of traditional gender roles and the holy covenant of marriage. One leading German actress of the time refused to play the part of Nora A Doll’s House as written, leading Ibsen to rewrite a softened ending in the fear that if he didn’t pull the punch on his own play, another, less skilled dramatist would.

Hedda Gabler tells the story of the daughter of a celebrated military man trapped in a loveless, unfulfilling marriage and since its 1891 debut in Germany, it has become the best known of all Ibsen’s plays. Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith, Glenda Jackson, Judy Davis and Cate Blanchett are among the leading lights to have played the title role. The first performances of A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler seen in Australia featured the English actress Janet Achurch, who toured the Antipodes between 1889 and 1891. The most recent major production of A Doll’s House in Sydney starred Miranda Otto in 2002. Cate Blanchett dazzled audiences with her Hedda in 2004.

Nora and Hedda are revolutionary figures in drama, says Professor Julie Holledge, an Australian academic currently working at the Centre for Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo. “The social context is very important, Ibsen wrote these plays at the beginning of the first wave of European feminism,” she says. “He was an avid newspaper reader, and used them as an important source of stories and ideas for his dramas. He was aware of the contemporary debates about equality for women in education, property rights and divorce. Nora and Hedda are products of those debates. They challenged audiences to think about the way power functions within the domestic world, and to question cultural assumptions about motherhood.”

Women in real life were demanding autonomy and an expansion of women’s rights, Holledge says. “But that complexity was not represented on the stage. The interesting central characters were all male. The female characters were foils: virtuous wives, loving daughters, or mistresses who died beautifully in Act V. Hedda does not die of consumption - the classic death of the nineteenth century heroine - she is a pregnant woman who decides, calmly and rationally, to commit suicide.”

Matilda Ridgway and Francesca Savige in A Doll's House by Sport for Jove (photo Seiya Taguchi)

American academic and author Joan Templeton, who published a survey of Ibsen’s female characters, Ibsen’s Women, in 2006, believes Ibsen was the first male writer to treat women as people rather than some inferior form of human life.

“Because of that, A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler caused enormous scandals, not just literary scandals, but social and cultural scandals when they were first put on stage in in Europe and in America,” Templeton says.

Nora “horrified” many in the audience, says Templeton. “Hedda was hated even more. She was considered a ‘monster in the form of a woman’, an ‘unwomanly woman’, ‘a dragon’ and so on. Hedda has aroused more hate than any woman in literature, including Medea and Lady Macbeth.”

Director Adena Jacobs finds Hedda fascinating and mysterious. “She is filled with conflicting sets of desires, it’s impossible to pin her down and from a director’s point-of-view, there is something irresistible about that,” Jacobs says.

“We might think of Hedda as a rebel or a deviant but she is also a coward and someone who is deeply fearful and anxious. She has all these wild urges but is unable to express them and we end up with a totally contradictory figure who comes back from her honeymoon to her dream house and she’s dead 36 hours later. It’s one of the most shocking set ups for a character in the theatre.”

Ash Flanders as Hedda Gabler at Belvoir (photo by Ellis Parrinder)

Jacobs says casting a male actor as Hedda will allow audiences to see the role in new ways. “For me, it separates Hedda Gabler from being a purely woman’s drama and it looks at the figure of Hedda as a person who is having a crisis of identity,” she says. “The major thrust of the play is a person desperate to escape. The sexual agenda has increased since Ibsen’s time, it is so much more complex and there’s something about casting Ash [Flanders] in the role that will place it beyond gender.

It will be a very unsettling and eerie account of contemporary society.”

Belvoir’s Nora has been co-written by Kit Brookman and director Anne-Louise Sarks. “It’s not a new version of A Doll’s House, it’s a new work that takes its departure point from A Doll’s House,” Brookman explains. “It’s set in Sydney today. Nora is middle class and married with children but she doesn’t have full time staff and we understand that fathers are now more involved in raising children. In our version we are understand just how far society has come but we can also see how far we have to go.”

Damien Ryan (Torvald) and Blazey Best (Nora) in rehearsals at Belvoir (photo by Brett Boardman)

By contrast, Adam Cook says his adaptation of A Doll’s House will give audiences the chance to see the play in period costume and performed as it was written. “Not everyone wants to see a post-modern deconstruction of it or something that is not the original play,” he says. “But Nora will speak in a contemporary voice. It has to feel exciting and human and visceral to our ears. The big question you want the audience to be thinking is, ‘what would I do?’ ‘How would I handle that?’ It’s not a loveless marriage at all but it’s not healthy in terms of honesty and openness. Those issues never go away.”

Hedda Gabler opens at Belvoir on July 2, 2014. A Doll’s House opens at the Seymour Centre on July 19, 2014. Nora opens at Belvoir on August 13, 2014.

This story was first published in Spectrum in the Sydney Morning Herald on June 10, 2014.