What Ibsen may have done for womankind has been much debated, but for women in the theatre his gifts do keep on giving. As victimized and oppressed as Hedda Gabler and Nora Helman may be in their fictional worlds, stage divas have dominated the stage in their names ever since Ibsen's ink dried. The dynamism of these plays' protagonists is their blessing and their curse. The roles can attract star power, bringing talent, but potentially eclipsing and unbalancing the rest of each play's crucial ensemble. On the other hand, if the actress brings none of the requisite presence and depth to bear, everyone's in for a cold Norwegian night, staring at an empty fireplace.
On the New York stage, stars don't get much bigger than Cate Blanchett, and I will start by attesting to the Oscar-winner's natural charisma and stage chops. This is a good start in such a massive and omnipresent role as Hedda. In Robyn Nevin's production for the visiting Sydney Theatre Company, Ms. Gabler-Tesman, as she might wish to be called today, lurks more than ever, drifting through Fiona Crombie's surprisingly (for this play) airy mansion of a set. Incessantly restless and fidgety, moving furniture pieces and disrupting flower arrangements, this Hedda would pull focus even were she not a glamour-cover movie star.
At first one might be aghast at Blanchett's disregard of her fellow actors, until you realize the choice here is to make Hedda just that...well, bitchy. It's good for a few laughs up front - aided by the snappy dialogue of Andrew Upton's "adaptation" which barely refrains from outright anachronism. Blanchett's orneriness ends up working against the play, however, because it's just too winning, oddly enough - at least for the hipsters in the BAM audience perhaps new to the play.
About halfway through I had to remind myself that there actually was some depth to this play, and that Hedda wasn't just a time-traveler from Sex and the City forced into a corset to endure the Ibsenite expostulating of some 19th-century stuffshirts. (Appropriately, Kristian Fredrikson's costumes inch it all up to about 1910, it seems. And not too badly.)
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