About the work
Henrik Ibsen's drama „Hedda Gabler" was premiered in Munich in 1891 and is, alongside „A Doll's House", his most-performed work. The play is regarded as a masterpiece of psychological realism and as the prototype of the modern „bored" intellectual woman.
Plot
Christiania (Oslo), 1890. Hedda Gabler, daughter of the late General Gabler, has just returned from a long honeymoon with her bourgeois academic husband Jørgen Tesman. Pregnant and bored, she lives in a villa Tesman has bought beyond his means to please her. Hedda receives visits: her timid school friend Thea Elvsted, who has left her husband to follow the brilliant alcoholic writer Eilert Løvborg — Hedda's old admirer. Løvborg has stopped drinking through Thea and written a brilliant manuscript. Hedda, jealous of Thea's influence, gives Løvborg her father's pistols, urges him to drink and burns the manuscript when she gets hold of it. Løvborg, in despair, shoots himself — not heroically „with a vine leaf in his hair" as Hedda had hoped, but messily in a brothel. Judge Brack, who knows the pistol came from Hedda, threatens to blackmail her with the knowledge. Cornered, Hedda goes to her room and shoots herself.
Cultural significance
Hedda Gabler is one of the great female roles in modern theatre — alongside Lady Macbeth, Medea, Phaedra. Famous Heddas include Eleonora Duse, Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith, Fiona Shaw, Cate Blanchett, Ruth Wilson. Productions by Ingmar Bergman (1964), Thomas Ostermeier (Schaubühne 2005) and Ivo van Hove are reference performances.