Reviews

This brought about such discontent amoung the students in my AP English class. Is Hedda selfish? Is she a trapped woman? Is she too harsh? Too "man-ish"? Too arrogant? Too willfull? Too much for a class of 17 year olds to handle? I quite enjoy Hedda's willfullness and her grating dialogue. Theatrical realism with touch of Ibsen's symbolic qulaities.

catson's review against another edition

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dark emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

hldahlseid's review

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2.0

Initially, I thought I’d prefer watching rather than reading Hedda Gabler, since the book gives much less description. But instead, most of the productions I watched scenes from seemed to not fit with my idea of the play, almost like a form of cognitive dissonance. I think this is because of the lack of extra detail in how most plays are written, compared to fiction prose, allowing me more creative liberties. For example, in the 1981 version, the actress who plays Hedda doesn’t portray her with the complex and conflicting feelings I got from the book, even though nothing clearly told me this about Hedda, it was just my interpretation. Even in highschool when we watched different scenes from different productions of Romeo and Juliet, I didn’t like how much they didn’t seem to fit with how I took in the play when reading it initially. I see playwriting as a lack of clarity and missing key pieces of information, and I think other people who like plays see it as room for imagination.

The production I liked the best was done in 2016 by the National Theatre. I rewatched the trailer we saw in class and was again instantly captivated by the tension, conflicting emotion, and messy morality clearly shown by Hedda’s character. One of the clips was a montage of scenes from the play, and the actors' descriptions of what it was like playing their characters. One of them was saying how the three different men in the play have one characteristic or trait that really fits them, whereas Hedda is a combination of so much more complexity. This was very interesting to me, because it connects to gender expectations in society, an idea present throughout the entire play. Ibsen wrestled with these social themes in the plot, but also how it was written, in things like characterization. This makes it a feminist play, even though it doesn’t seem that way at first, because we see a woman who is flawed, but a whole person, and like mentioned in the interview I watched, that is not as common in theater. It is hard to decide if we want to root for Hedda or not, and this conflicting relationship between the audience and the main character is almost like a social experiment.

sarawiser's review against another edition

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5.0

oh, how I NEED to play Hedda

videotape's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A Doll's House? Never heard of it... Hedda Gabler's where it's at.

Ibsen is so joyous to read, due to his incredible talent of writing such realistic characters. No matter how unrelatable the scenario is, in this case social politics at the top of the Norwegian hierarchy during the late Victorian era, Ibsen's realism greatly accentuates the slimy, complex nature of each persona; resulting in a cacophony of rich, somehow relatable story-threads that climax with the collision of each characters true intentions.

Gone are the melodramatic tropes of watered down Shakespearean dramas, and here are the days of a more realistic theatrical experience.

jlewis_9's review against another edition

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dark reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

mollyrenemidd's review against another edition

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1.0

Yawn.

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