Turkey Gabler

By T.E. Kalem

Hedda Gabler by HENRIK IBSEN

The world has not been waiting for, nor is it long likely to cherish Glenda Jackson's bizarre offering: a comic Hedda Gabler. She has apparently decided that Noel Coward is really the author of the play. Her performance at Washington, D.C.'s National Theater will certainly rank high in the annals of dramatic travesty.

Presumably, British Director Trevor Nunn must shoulder part of the blame. If he were a line officer in charge of combat troops--and the responsibilities of a stage director are somewhat similar--he would be stripped of his rank and summarily cashiered.

Since no single aspect of Glenda Jackson's performance is unflawed, there is a wealth of errors to choose from. Hedda is a fastidious aristocrat and the proud daughter of a general. Jackson endows her with all the grace, style and elegance of Eliza Doolittle hawking flowers in Covent Garden. Hedda is broodingly neurotic and desperately bored. Jackson seems to be suffering no more than a fuzzy hangover.

Most important of all, Hedda's self-hatred translates into a destructive hatred of others--her academic clod of a husband, George Tesman (Peter Eyre), for example, and her onetime lover, the writer Eilert Luvborg (Patrick Stewart). Her wrath stems from the fact that she has betrayed her own Dionysian will to freedom. She is an older Nora who failed to slam the door on parochialism, co vention and hypocrisy. Jackson reduces all that to the level of cocktail-party sarcasm and suburban jitters.

She trivializes every major scene in the play. When she feeds the manuscript of Eilert's book to the flames, Ibsen has her say, "I am burning your baby." Jackson gives the line the emotional urgency of someone tossing away old telephone bills into the wastebasket. When she takes her own life with her father's pistol, it should be a stark and moving epiphany. Jackson makes it seem like a one-minute ad campaign for stricter gun control.

Timid Soul. Her one imperious achievement of the evening is to act as if she were the only person onstage. Since she delivers her part of the dialogue like nightclub one-liners, she might as well be alone. As Hedda's sinister admirer Judge Brack, Timothy West is as sensually menacing as a puff of cigar smoke. If Patrick Stewart's Luvborg has "vine leaves in his hair," they are not Greek but plastic. As Hedda's husband, a timid soul and a baffled marital masochist who dotes on books, Peter Eyre salvages the only acting honors in this debacle.

Ibsen never wrote a richer or more penetrating play. Rarely, if ever, has that play been so impoverished in a stage presentation.

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