SShe wants to have a nice life, and if that isn't possible, at least to be a nuisance to the ugly ones. This is the expectation that Hedda Gabler opposed to being trapped in a marriage that didn't stimulate much imagination. She finds the narrow life an affront. She cannot formulate that it is not free because her own norms follow the rule of virtue. “What should people think?” she says herself, afraid of the scandal that liberation would mean. Gabler's resistance is aesthetic. She resists everything that her environment demands of her morally in the name of beauty.
Hedda Gabler married the scholar Jørgen Tesman because she was “tired of dancing” and gave in to the idea of a villa with servants in livery, evening invitations and a riding horse. Tesman, who is anxiously waiting for his permanent position, cannot finance all of this, which is why the misfortune does not take its course, but is just another name for Hedda Gabler's existence. Everything is too stuffy, too stupid, too predictable for her. She is the common-law sister of Dorian Gray, who fought against boredom and aging his whole life.
At the Darmstadt State Theater, David Stöhr stages Ibsen's play, which premiered in 1891, as an early feminist resistance against the boring world of men. Trixi Strobel as Hedda screams, rages, sings, sulks and plays sarcastically and petulantly against the circumstances that want to make a wife out of her. She is colorful, constantly changes clothes and puts on make-up. The others are monochrome. You won't get me, she says with every gesture and recites a poem by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhofen in which “heart” rhymes with “fart” and “art”. But Dadaism is not a solution in family life, and what Gabler himself is aiming for remains unclear. “Do? What?” At one point she says her ambition is to gain power over a single person.
Chamber play in the bungalow
This shows how much she has lost herself in resisting boredom. Because arbitrariness cannot compensate for powerlessness. The desire to be able to determine something remains empty if it remains unclear what should be determined. In this respect, Hedda Gabler exerts a compulsive and scheming influence on her former lover Eijlert Løvburg, who Florian Donath portrays as Tesman's weak-willed rival. Løvburg ends up killing himself, but Hedda is having none of it. She embraces disaster and defiantly follows it.
Even before this, it is malice with which she defends herself. She makes mocking comments, belittles those around her, pretends to be inattentive when she listens disinterestedly, promises herself sadistically: “I will call you Tabea, like before!” But the unsuspecting friend, played by Berna Celebi, was always called Thea , and Gabler knows this well. She makes everyone pay for their own suffering, and Ibsen, like a cruel investigating judge, extracts from the smallest turns of events the evidence of a misfortune that further affects the resistance that is put up against it. “No one lies as much as the indignant,” says Nietzsche. When a huge ant suddenly lies on the doorstep of the Tesmans' home in Darmstadt, the exterminator-like nature of the entire piece emerges: there is guilt in every corner.
David Stöhr occasionally recites fashionable phrases that talk about heteronormativity, technosomatics, capitalism and the power of discourses about gender and ask whether we are subjects or rather “subjectivized”. This happens at such a volume and pace that even students of gender studies may find it difficult to make sense of these sayings. They cannot be considered as an interpretation of the play within the play and remain a postmodern interlude from which the characters' haunting chamber play quickly takes us back to the hopelessness of their relationships.
Løvburg is seduced by Gabler to relapse into drunkenness, without her seeming to want anything more from him than his downfall. Tesman watches everything helplessly and is only interested in organizing his papers. The judge Brack, whom Thorsten Loeb plays with restrained and therefore greater diabolism, just wants to be a friend to everyone, but speculates on erotic approaches to Gabler. The only friendly person besides the friend Thea, Aunt Julle, played by Gabriele Drechsel as a young-at-heart old woman in sneakers, is snubbed right from the start by the landlady because she adores Tesman, the loser. In Hedda's eyes, only she deserves adoration.
In 1977, Peter Zadek staged “Hedda Gabler” in Bochum, in the magnificent set of a monumental villa. You can still get an impression on YouTube today of how Ulrich Wildgruber dominates the stage as the brilliant Løvberg, Hermann Lause plays a Tesman who gives the best reasons for Hedda's disappointment, and Rosel Zech plays the title heroine as a resigned woman who wants her own demands are not met and she tries hard to appear the femme fatale. In Darmstadt, however, we see a chamber play in the bungalow and see the cold, self-absorbed Hedda who humiliates those around her. This is closer to Ibsen's judgment of the spoiled woman. But that also makes things easier with her and her misfortune.
#David #Stöhr39s #Hedda #Gabler #Darmstadt
