Trevor Nunn (1975)
Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler isn’t a barrel of laughs but the BFI build-up to this screening of Trevor Nunn’s film of the play was a comedy of errors.
‘The rare 35mm print we are presenting is courtesy of the National Library of Norway and therefore has Norwegian subtitles. We hope audience members will not find these too distracting.’
That was the advance warning email to those who’d booked for Hedda in this month’s Glenda Jackson retrospective. In fact, it was the third such email because the first two got the show times wrong. On the day, a BFI person took to the stage to reiterate the above and apologise for the visual quality of the print – one of those fade-to-pink specials from the 1970s. He went on to explain that the outstanding lead performance meant it was still worth showing the film, as part of the Janet [sic] Jackson season.
I didn’t expect to see Hedda just a day after Dangerous Liaisons (1988) but Stephen Frears’ film had turned up on BBC4 the night before. As a result, I sat down to watch Nunn’s version of Ibsen with Frears’ translation of stage material to the screen, and what I felt was wrong with it, fresh in my mind. Even without this coincidence, though, Hedda would have come over as an egregious example of ‘filmed theatre’. (Important to make clear that it’s hardly fair to mention these two films – as films – in the same breath: returning to Dangerous Liaisons after thirty plus years, I found it dissatisfying but it’s streets ahead of Hedda.) Nunn’s picture was an adaptation of his stage production for the RSC. The argument for filming a play in this way is that the screen version supplies a valuable record that wouldn’t otherwise exist. The argument is valid only up to a point. If the adapter turns the stage production into faux cinema, as Nunn does with Hedda, it’s not only inadequate as a film but tends to rob the piece of what may have been important assets in the theatre.
In this case, there were additional grounds for making the film: there hadn’t been a previous English-language version of Hedda Gabler in the cinema, as opposed to on television (nor has there been another since). Hedda – so called because American distributors hoped audiences might think they were buying tickets for a biopic of the quite recently deceased Hedda Hopper? – starts on board the steamer on which the title character is returning from honeymoon with her husband, George Tesman (Peter Eyre). There are shots of mountains and fjords. There’s a crowd scene of sorts, as the newlyweds disembark and are greeted, before a carriage drive back to the marital home. This scene-setting opening up of the play, which accounts for only a couple of screen minutes, isn’t an issue. Once the camera enters the couple’s house, it stays there, except for a brief interlude, about halfway through, when the Tesmans’ maid, Bertha (Pam St Clement in an unexpected pre-EastEnders role), goes outside to collect the day’s delivery of milk. So Nunn doesn’t dilute the drama. The problem is, rather, with how he films the action indoors.
As a sequence of events, Ibsen’s plot may read like melodrama but a suitably rhythmical production needn’t be experienced as such, even on screen. I don’t remember finding melodramatic the first Hedda Gabler that I ever saw, a BBC Play of the Month in 1972, directed by Waris Hussein, with Janet Suzman (then married to Trevor Nunn) in the lead. In Hedda, any sort of rhythm is lost thanks to clumsy and unimaginative attempts to be ‘filmic’ – close-ups of character as they deliver lines, reaction shots, a score by Laurie Johnson better suited to Hollywood romantic tragedy. Nearly all the performances seem overemphatic. Perhaps they were in the theatre, too, but, even if they were, Nunn’s technique, such as it is, magnifies their flaws. It probably didn’t help Patrick Stewart, who plays Ejlert Løvborg, that he hadn’t made a film before this one. Peter Eyre’s Tesman is such a foolish wimp (crudely so, unlike Ian McKellen’s Tesman in that Play of the Month) that his marriage to Hedda isn’t just bound to fail but is utterly incredible. Jennie Linden (Thea Elvsted), Constance Chapman (Aunt Julie) and, especially, Timothy West (a jocular but sinister Judge Brack) are better but all are hamstrung by Nunn’s direction.
So is the leading lady, though you can’t help wondering if Janet is really cut out anyway to play Hedda Gabler. She has wit, authority and intelligent vocal variety in the role, wearing her close-fitting gown like a straitjacket. But she registers Hedda’s furious claustrophobia instantly and unequivocally, leaving little scope for developing the character. You not only can’t imagine that this Hedda would ever have given weedy, pedantic George Tesman the time of day. You can’t see either why Judge Brack is drawn to a woman so full of aggression, so lacking in sensuality and surface charm. All you really believe of Glenda Jackson’s portrait is that this is a woman angrily desperate enough to shoot herself dead.
8 July 2022
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