A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  Paris

  May 1893 Opera Comique Hedda: Janet Achurch

  London

  March 1898 5th Avenue Theatre Hedda: Elizabeth Robins

  New York

  February 1899 Moscow Art Theatre Hedda: Maria F. Andreeva

  Moscow

  October 1903 Adelphi Theatre Hedda: Eleonora Duse

  London

  October 1903 Manhattan Theatre Hedda: Minnie Maddern

  New York Fiske

  November 1906 Komissarzhevshaya Hedda: Vera

  St. Petersburg Theatre Komissarzhevskaya

  November 1906 Princess Theatre Hedda: Alla Nazimova

  New York

  March 1907 Court Theatre Hedda: Mrs Patrick Campbell

  London

  Performance and reception

  Given the subtext of Hedda Gabler outlined in Ibsen’s notes – that “the play shall deal with cthe impossible’” and with “ ‘underground forces and powers’”, plus the association of women with “Nihilism” – it is hardly surprising to find both actors and audiences uncomprehending. Both the world premiere in Germany at the Residenztheater (13 January 1891) and the first Paris performance (17 December 1891) at the Théâtre du Vaudeville were judged disastrous. The popular Munich actress Marie Conrad-Ramlo played Hedda in a conventionally histrionic and declamatory style, while the French comedienne Marthe Brandès presenting her as a stereotypical seductress was forced to close the production after a single matinee performance. Even the Norwegian public was confused, despite Ibsen’s involvement in the Christiana production.

  When the play was presented in England by Elizabeth Robins (Vaudeville Theatre, 20 April 1891), the response was moral outrage, as William Archer’s summary of the reviews shows. The tone of these criticisms echoed the reactions to earlier productions of A Doll’s House, and particularly Ghosts, indicating the way that any play by Ibsen became a batdeground between conservative and reformist forces in the period. Indeed, this selection of criticism by Archer also documents the campaign for Ibsen, and is highly selective in omitting the praise of Robins’ performance by even the most antagonistic reviewers – such as Clement Scott, who acknowledged a “morbid attraction” in Robins’ “sublime study of deceit and heartlessness … What changes of expression! What watchfulness! … She has fascinated us with the savage” (Illustrated London News, 25 April 1891).

  Figure 4.2 Studio portrait of Elizabeth Robins as Hedda Gabler, London, 1891

  4.4.3 Susan Mason, Hedda Gabler at the Christiana Theater, 26 February

  The production was received without enthusiasm by the public and by the critics who, for the most part, found the play confusing. The main criticism of Miss Bruun’s Hedda was that she was too cold. The critic for Aftenposten wrote that she has created an individual out of “the problematic female character” and that she brought out the “aristocratic, blasé, boredom with life and the cold passion” but did not bring out the other aspects. The Dagbladet critic wrote that Hedda should be like “champagne on ice” and that Miss Bruun served the ice but forgot the champagne. He also commented on the confusion in the audience and one member asking, “Don’t these people ever eat breakfast?”

  The Dagbladet critic continues that Miss Bruun lacked “the finer shadings” which a few more rehearsals would have achieved. Given the still relatively short rehearsal period, there is probably some truth in this observation. In addition, he felt Miss Bruun’s Hedda had already decided to kill herself by the first act and “she is too blasé and too finished with life from the first to the last.” He thought that unhappy love was Hedda’s tragedy and her failure to win back Eilert should have been played as the cause of her suicide. Furthermore, he was confused by the relationship between Hedda and Brack. She played the earlier scene about the train both “secretive and promising” which made it confusing at the ending when she was so opposed to being in his power.

  Although the Dagbladet reviewer found the overall performance lacking fullness and intensity, he noted the difficulty of the role, and suggested Miss Bruun’s admirable performance would improve. Several months later when Ibsen attended, this same reviewer wrote that now “there is an intensity and clear development … a fully formed figure.”

  The critic for Morgenbladet wrote that Miss Bruun had understood the role’s various sides, and the reviewer for Shillings Magazin mentions her intellectual grasp of the role. However the latter was critical of the actress’ spontaneity – “letting the demonic out everywhere, lightly and playfully” and “supplementing his [Ibsen’s] strict style with the kind of spontaneity not really appropriate. …” He also mentions the ensemble acting, especially noting the scenes between Hedda and Brack and “how far our stage has reached in the last few years in the direction of natural speech.” Olaf Hansson, who played Brack, was known for his naturalistic line delivery and movement. One historian even asserts that Hansson was the first Norwegian actor who seriously turned his back to the public.

  Because Bjørn Bjørnson directed this production and because he was such an exacting director, his comments on Hedda may indicate how he instructed Miss Bruun to play the role. He wrote that Hedda was “too weak to let herself go until she threw herself into death – the single, heedless, integrated courageous thing in her whole messed up life.” He also wrote that Miss Bruun’s tendency was toward coolness but that in the scene in front of the fire she was “hysterically wild.” By Bjørnson’s account, Ibsen later told him, “That is how pregnant women can become.” Also, the words about “dying in beauty with vine-leaves in the hair – are from the same workshop.” As in an earlier reference, Ibsen attributed much of Hedda’s behavior to her pregnancy.

  4.4.4 William Archer, The English Reception of Hedda Gabler

  “The Mausoleum of Ibsen”, Fortnightly Review, 1 July 1893

  Ghosts was produced at the first performance of the Independent Theatre. The frenzy of execration with which it was greeted must be within the memory of all my readers. […]

  Nothing daunted by the tempest, Miss Elizabeth Robins and Miss Marion Lea produced Hedda Gabler only five weeks later (April 20th, 1891). This time the “suburban Ibsen,” the “egotist and bungler,” was found by the Daily Telegraph to have produced a “ghasdy picture beautifully painted.” “It was like a visit to the Morgue …. There they all lay on their copper couches, fronting us, and waiting to be owned …. There they all were, false men, wicked women, deceitful friends, sensualists, egotists, piled up in a heap behind the screen of glass, which we were thankful for …. There were the dead bodies, and no one could resist looking at them. Art was used for the most baleful purpose. It is true that the very spectacle of moral corruption was positively fascinating …. Would indeed that, after this Morgue inspection, after this ghasdy spectacle of dead bodies and suicides, after this revolting picture of human frailty and depravity, there could be a break in the cloud …. But alas! there is no gleam to be seen in the dark raincloud of Ibsenite pessimism! … What a horrible story! What a hideous play!” Most of my readers are probably aware that there is only one dead body in Hedda Gabler, seen for something like a quarter of a minute just as the curtain falls. But what must the readers of the Daily Telegraph have gathered from the outburst I have just quoted? “I should like so much to see the piece you’re in,” a lady said to Mr. Scott Buist, the excellent Tesman of the cast, “but I don’t think I could stand anything so horrible.” “Horrible! How do you mean?” he inquired. “Why, you have the Morgue on the stage, haven’t you?” was the reply. And I have no doubt many thousands of people were under the same impression, on that 21st (not 1st) of April. The other critics, if less imaginative, were no less denunciatory.

  “Ibsen’s plays regarded as masterpieces of genius by a small but noisy set of people, but … the tastes of English playgoers are sound and healthy, and the hollowness and shams of the Ibsen cult need only be known to be rejected.” –Standard.

  “Dr. Ibsen’s social dramas have yet to prove their power to interest cul
tivated audiences; for the limited number of worshippers who proclaim these productions as masterpieces of art and stagecraft … cannot be accepted as a fair sample even of the educated public.” – Daily News.

  “Robust common-sense of ordinary English audiences will confirm the adverse judgment pronounced upon the morbid Norwegian dramatist by all save a clique of faddists anxious to advertise themselves by the aid of any eccentricity that comes first to hand… . Already, we fancy, the craze has had its day.” – Sporting and Dramatic News.

  “One left the theatre filled with depression at the sorry spectacle that had been set before them (sic).” – Reynolds’ Newspaper.

  “A few steps out of the hospital-ward and we arrive at the dissecting-room. Down a little lower and we come to the deadhouse. There, for the present, Ibsen has left us …. Miss Elizabeth Robins has done what no doubt she fully intended to do (!). She has made vice attractive by her art. She has almost ennobled crime. She has glorified an unwomanly woman,” &c., &c. Mr. C. Scott in the Illustrated London News.

  “Hideous nightmare of pessimism … The play is simply a bad escape of moral sewage-gas …. Hedda’s soul is a-crawl with the foulest passions of humanity.” – Pictorial World.

  “The piece is stuff and nonsense; poor stuff and ‘pernicious nonsense.’ It is as if the author had studied the weakest of the Robertsonian comedies, and had thought he could do something like it in a tragic vein.” –Punch.

  “It is not, possibly, so utterly repulsive as others that have been seen, but, nevertheless, it is offensive.” – Lloyd’s News.

  “The more I see of Ibsen, the more disgusted I am with his alleged dramas.” London.

  “Utterly pessimistic in its tedious turmoil of knaves and fools… . Other plays from the same tainted source.” – The People.

  “Full of loathsomeness.” – The Table.

  “Things rank and gross in nature alone have place in the mean and sordid philosophy of Ibsen …. Can any human being feel happier or better from a contemplation of the two harlots at heart who do duty in Hedda Gabler? … Insidious nastiness of photographic studies of vice and morbidity. … It is free from the mess and nastiness of Ghosts, the crack-brained maunderings of Rosmersholm, the fantastic, shortsighted folly of A Doll’s House … The blusterous little band of Ibsen idolaters …. ” – Saturday Review.

  “Strange provincial prigs and suburban chameleons …. The funereal clown who is amusing us … is given to jokes in very questionable taste. We are reminded again and again of Goethe’s famous stage direction, ‘Mephistopheles macht eine unaständige Geberde,’ and it is a coarseness of this sort which, I fear, constitutes Ibsen’s charm for some of his disciples …. For sheer unadulterated stupidity, for inherent meanness and vulgarity, for pretentious triviality … no Bostonian novel or London penny novelette has surpassed Hedda Gabler;”

  Mr. ROBERT BUCHANAN in the Illustrated London News.

  *

  The reception of Hedda Gabler in England, which was widely recognized as a vindication of Ibsen’s theatre despite the attacks on what was seen as the immorality and pessimism of the play’s vision, was largely due to the psychological character study on which Robins based her performance. This was oudined in her commentary forty years later in Ibsen and the Actress. The feminist implications of her interpretation were indeed overlooked (as she indicates); even Lady Bell, whom she mentions as one of her strongest women supporters, focuses solely on the “corrosiveness” and “tragic” nature of the characterization:

  Who that saw it will ever forget what Elizabeth Robins did with the second act? The crouching figure by the fire, Løvborg’s book in her terrible maleficent grasp, the firelight flickering on the sinister triumph of hatred in her eyes, as handful by handful she cast the manuscript into the flames, the intensity of her sibilant whisper shuddering through the air – ‘Your child, Thea! Your child and Eilert Lovborg’s … now I am burning the child!’

  (Landmarks, 1929)

  Significantly this highpoint in the performance departed from Ibsen’s text – as Archer notes Robins also did at other key moments. In her marked acting script for the production Robins crossed out Ibsen’s detailed and specific stage directions, substituting her own actions and lines to intensify the pathological destructiveness and emotion:

  Hedda holds out her hands, wavering a little as he [Løvborg] goes out. She utters a broken cry, grasps curtains, looks back at desk where manuscript is and whispers hoarsely, ‘Thea! Thea!’ – again and again as she crosses the room, takes out ms with eager hands, catches sight of stove, glides to it and drops before it opening door and muttering, ‘Who? child, the child’ – crushes some leaves and burns them during ‘How I love burning your child’.

  Henry James was first exposed to Ibsen by seeing Elizabeth Robins in Hedda Gabler. His description of the production used her rendering of the role as a basis to interpret Ibsen’s work, pointing out:

  It is the portrait of a nature, the story of what Paul Bourget would call an état à âme, and of a state of nerves as well as soul, a state of temper, of disappointment, of desperation. Hedda Gabler is in short the study of an exasperated woman … We receive Hedda ripe for her catastrophe, and if we ask for antecedents and explanations we must simply find them in her character. Her motives are simply her passions.

  (The New Review, June 1891)

  James defined Ibsen’s “great quality” as “dealing essentially with the individual caught in the fact” – and the wide influence of his essay effectively imposed this performance as the standard view of Hedda’s character.

  Whatever its subsequent critical importance, however, at the time the effect of this production was perhaps more limited than Robins’ supporters – who included Shaw as well as Archer and James – claimed. As one reviewer noted on revisiting Hedda Gabler towards the end of its run, the English audience for Ibsen was limited to an educated and politically radical elite:

  Remarkable, indeed, has been the fate of Hedda Gabler at the Vaudeville. Only last week this pretty theatre was unto the worshippers at the shrine of Ibsen as a sort of temple, and the denizens of the stalls and dress circle were even more interesting than the odd drama itself. Their enthusiasm for their idol used to inspire his interpreters; and certainly the matinee performances of Hedda Gabler were vastly superior to those which take place now nightly at Mr. Thome’s theatre, although the cast remains unaltered. Before the lie [common public], which pays its shillings and its pence to enjoy an amusing or be thrilled by an exciting play, the aspect of things changed as if by magic. The pit and the gallery watched in blank amazement the vagaries of the lunatic Hedda, and listened to the crudely coarse dialogue with stupefaction. But little applause followed the fall of the curtain, and Miss Elizabeth Robins and Miss Marion Lea [Thea] both felt the chilly influence, and their old magic spell seemed broken.

  (Saturday Review, 16 May 1891)

  4.4.5 Elizabeth Robins, on playing Hedda

  Ibsen and the Actress, Hogarth Press, 1928

  I have somewhere several sets of page proofs of Hedda Gabler as they left the hands of the translators; one set scored over in Marion Lea’s handwriting, one with mine, and our final agreed recommendations. These Mr Archer fully criticised, sometimes denounced and utterly declined; but the final result was, I think, a very speakable, very playable version, no less faithful – I have always held more faithful – to Ibsen […]

  The press notices were a palpitating excitement, especially those we jeered at – with anxiety in our hearts. But we put on a bold front. Mr Clement Scott understand Hedda? – any man except that wizard Ibsen really understand her? Of course not. That was the tremendous part of it. How should men understand Hedda on the stage when they didn’t understand her in the persons of their wives, their daughters, their women friends? One lady of our acquaintance, married and not noticeably unhappy, said laughing, “Hedda is all of us.”

  Hedda was not all of us, but she was a good many of us – so Mr Grant All
en told the public. Anyway, she was a bundle of the unused possibilities, educated to fear life; too much opportunity to develop her weakness; no opportunity at all to use her best powers […]

  Hedda is first represented to us as an enviable person. We hear of what General Gabler’s daughter had “been accustomed to”; how fond she was of dancing, and shooting at a mark and riding with her handsome father – she “in her long black habit and with feathers in her hat.” “So beset with admirers,” Aunt Julia says – who would have dreamt she would marry a mere professor? Well, she wasn’t on the scene sixty seconds before it was clear she knew there was joy in life that she hadn’t been able to grasp, and that marriage only emphasised what she was missing.

  It was never any wish of mine to whitewash General Gabler’s somewhat lurid daughter. Even in the heat and glamour of that first personal contact with a great Ibsen part, I was under no temptation to try to make her what is conventionally known as “sympathetic.” One surviving recollection bears witness to that. Among those who never much cared about Ibsen, but always came to see him acted, was Lady Bell. At the first performance of Hedda she was thought by her companion to be in danger of lending herself too much to the glamour of the play; so this friend of Lady Bell’s youth warned her: “It’s all very exciting, but I wouldn’t trust her round the corner – that woman playing Hedda.”

  I had the best of reasons for not trying to mitigate Hedda’s corrosive qualities. It was precisely the corrosive action of those qualities on a woman in Hedda’s circumstances that made her the great acting opportunity she was – in her revolt against those commonplace surroundings that the bookworm she had married thought so “elegant”; her unashamed selfishness; her scorn of so-called womanly qualities; above all, her strong need to put some meaning into her life, even at the cost of borrowing it, or stealing the meaning out of someone else’s.