Hedda Gabler

The play was first performed in Munich, Germany, at the Königliches Residenz-Theater on 31 January 1891, with Clara Heese as Hedda. The first British perfomance was at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, on 20 April the same year, starring Elizabeth Robins, who directed it with Marion Lea, who played Thea. Robins also played Hedda in the first US production, which opened on 30 March 1898 at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York. Many popular actresses have played the role: they include Eleanora Duse, Alla Nazimova, Asta Nielsen, Anne Meacham, Ingrid Bergman, Jill Bennett, Diana Rigg, Isabelle Huppert, Kate Burton, Kelly McGillis, Fiona Shaw and Cate Blanchett. In 2005, a production by Richard Eyre, starring Eve Best, at the Almeida Theatre in London has been well-received.

The play has been filmed a number of times, from silent movies onwards, and in many languages. In 1975, Glenda Jackson was nominated for an Academy Award as leading actress for her role in a British film adaptation, simply titled Hedda. A more recent American film version (2004) relocated the story to a community of young academics in Washington State.

The action takes place in a villa in Kristiania (present-day Oslo). Hedda Gabler, daughter of an impoverished General, has just returned from her honeymoon with Jørgen Tesman, an aspiring young academic - reliable but uninteresting. It becomes clear in the course of the play that she has never loved him, and she fears she may be pregnant. The reappearance of her former lover, Ejlert Løvborg, throws their lives into disarray. Løvborg, a writer, is also an alcoholic who has wasted his talent until now. Thanks to a relationship with Hedda's old schoolmate, Thea Elvsted (who has left her husband for him), he shows signs of rehabilitation, and has just completed what he considers to be his masterpiece. This means he now poses a threat to Tesman, as a competitor for the university professorship which Tesman had believed would be his.

Hedda, apparently jealous of Mrs Elvsted's influence over Ejlert, hopes to come between them. Tesman, on returning home from a party, finds the manuscript of Ejlert Løvborg's great work, which the latter has lost while drunk. When Hedda next sees him, he confesses to her, despairingly, that he has lost the manuscript. Instead of telling him that the manuscript has been found, Hedda burns it, and encourages him to consider suicide. She tells her husband she has destroyed the manuscript to secure their future, so that he, not Løvborg, will become a professor.

When the news comes that Løvborg has indeed killed himself, Tesman and Mrs Elvsted are determined to try to reconstruct his book from what they already know. Hedda is shocked to discover, from the sinister Judge Brack, that Ejlert's death, in a brothel, was messy and probably accidental. He appears to be blackmailing her. Leaving the others to discuss the situation, she goes into another room and shoots herself.

Film adaptations