25 July – 23 August
Writer and Director Matthew Dunster has breathed new life into Ibsen’s nineteen century masterpiece. And with a riveting, compelling performance from Lily Allen playing the lead backed by a very strong cast, the play is one of this year’s must-see productions.
Olivier winning designer Anna Fleischle’s set first piques our interest. The stage is semi-opaquely divided from the auditorium by a gauze curtain. Beyond it we can just make out the comfortable living room of a sophisticatedly furnished flat, adorned with 10 vases of white lilies. A sectional sofa sits centre stage with a retro record player and a collection of LP’s off to the right. A boxed set of antique Norwegian pistols sits on a table. As Julia (Imogen Stubbs), accompanied by ‘maid’ Danni (Najla Andrade) enters the room and draws back the blind covering the French windows to an unseen garden, so the gauze sweeps away from the front of stage giving us a sense we have entered a very personal space.
The talk is all of changed financial circumstances, how will Hedda’s determination to keep living in the style she has become accustomed to be paid for? And about the newlyweds, Hedda and George, just back from their long honeymoon abroad. Stubbs is excellent as the ‘mumsy’ aunt to young writer and intellectual George, trying to inject a positive approach to the situation they find themselves in – could there not be new children to look after soon?
This potential ‘cosiness’ of the relationship with the new ‘woman of the house’ is soon put to the test by the tetchy arrival of Hedda, swishing into the room wearing expensive light blue silk pyjamas, sucking occasionally on a vape. Allen absolutely commands the space she is in.
We are soon in no doubt that Hedda has had it up to here with married life – already feeling constrained by living with George, a nice but dull middle-class man with modest aspirations, esoteric interests and faltering means to provide. Hedda: “I’m NOT working, that’s not happening!”
Ciarán Owens is credible as the slightly naïve but good-hearted husband mostly turning a blind eye to withering rejection in the hope of some future sign of affection, sometimes aghast at her cheek. Allen projects a Hedda at times jaw-droppingly entitled, spoilt, self-centred and raging at the ‘gilded cage’ life she finds herself in. Women in the 1890s would have had no room for manoeuvre in such a situation – a contemporary woman could decide to walk away – this perhaps the only dichotomy in Dunster’s impeccable present-day re-write.
But Ibsen’s story implies deeper levels to Hedda’s psyche than mere petulance. She has been thrilled in the past by ‘dangerous’ (possibly sado-masochistic) love. And the man with whom she experienced it is just walking back into her sphere, but now attached to old schoolmate Taya (Julia Chan), who she used to bully. And as if that isn’t enough, the older Brack (Brendon Coyle), MP and old family friend, has designs upon her and begins to exert pressure on her for a shared relationship. The walls are closing in.
As Jasper, Tom Austen gives steamy energy to the brilliant-minded but flawed former alcoholic, now academic rival to Hedda’s husband George. Allen delivers palpable angst to Hedda’s internal struggle to position her conflicting ambitions for sexual love and financial security. Realising that the former is out of reach, she brilliantly illustrates a Hedda reaching down into a pool of tortured ideals and thwarted desires to fuel an eventual self-destruction that will provide the freedom that she so craves.
★★★★★ Simon Bishop, 14 August 2025
Photography credit: Manuel Harlan
