‘Every so often a dark impulse takes hold of me…’

Hedda Gabler is more her father’s daughter than her husband’s wife — a ruthless predator, incapable of bearing the weight of the world a bourgeois democracy promotes. ‘Sick of damn convention’, she is traumatized by marriage and, at the same time, aghast at the thought of scandal.

In Ibsen’s classic drama psychological frictions transcend a simple rebellion against Victorian mores. His protagonist’s overwhelming beauty and demonic appetite prove both irresistible and destructive, even fatal, to the members of her coterie.

On the eve of his eightieth birthday, Brian Friel, one of the greatest living playwrights, has rendered Ibsen’s revolutionary art with characteristic verve and vigour.

Norwegian playwright and ‘father of modern theatre’, Henrik Ibsen’s plays include A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck and Ghosts. Hedda Gabler was first produced, in Munich, in 1891.