Hedda Gabler

Hedda Gabler returns from her honeymoon already suffocating. Married to the well-meaning but tedious George Tesman, a man whose greatest excitement is his academic research, she finds herself imprisoned in a house she despises, playing the role of dutiful wife to an audience who bores her. Once she was General Gabler's daughter, wild, intelligent, feared. Now she is merely Hedda Tesman, and the world insists she be small. When her former flame Eilert Lovborg reappears, regenerated and triumphant, the possibility of genuine feeling crashes against her terror of scandal. What follows is a devastating meditation on the cost of choosing safety over freedom, and the violence that erupts when a vital spirit is caged in bourgeois respectability. Ibsen wrote that Hedda should be seen as her father's daughter, not her husband's wife, in this bracing, uncomfortable play, that identity conflict becomes a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.