Prim and Pallid Hedda

By T.E.K.

A great dramatic role leads a double life. The outer life is the dialogue, scenes, situations and narrative line that the playwright has bestowed on the play. The inner life is what the actor or actress brings to the play. That is why there have been as many differing Hamlets as there have been actors who have played the part. What makes certain actors great Hamlets is that they invest the role with an inner life of compelling richness, density and power. They risk and spend all that they themselves have learned about life and add it to mighty Shakespeare's best.

Another mighty playwright, Ibsen, offers an equivalent role for a woman in Hedda Gabler. The sad thing about the current off-Broadway revival is that the inner life that Claire Bloom brings to it is chilly, prim and pallid. The inner life is extremely important to Hedda, for otherwise what is left is the story of a kind of grown-up "bad seed," a woman who out of casual malice or native bitchiness burns her would-be lover's brilliant manuscript, pushes him back to drink and gives him a pistol with instructions to shoot himself.

Who would want to meet that sort of woman? For 80 years, playgoers have indicated that they are extremely interested in meeting Hedda. They want to know about everything that Miss Bloom fails to tell them: the source and force of her unspent passion, of her neurotic boredom, of her worship of her father, of her loathing for her husband and of many other intriguing things. The playwright has given the actress gold, but it lies under dark ground where she must assiduously dig. The degree of angst that Claire Bloom conveys could easily be relieved with a couple of aspirin.

In the rest of the cast, only Donald Madden as Eilert Lovborg, Hedda's prime target (apart from herself), achieves true Ibsenite intensity and anguish. In a profoundly moving scene he tells of losing his manuscript in the way that a carousing father might lose all track of a child and who, coming home, says to the mother, "I lost the child--completely lost him. God knows who's got hold of him." After giving an animal cry, Madden opens his mouth again in a terrible soundless scream and sags lifelessly, like a crucified soul. That is an epiphany. For in one blinding instant, we see the great play that for the rest of the evening is not seen onstage.

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