In a special two-for-the-price-of-one review, Eric Page and Michael Hootman spend a night with Ibsen's tragic anti-heroine.

Mr Page writes:
Hedda Gabbler is an odd creature and this setting by Adrian Nobel follows Ibsen’s tradition of remolding the set theatrical conventions to focus the action in the motivation of the main character.

Rosamund Pike’s Hedda is strutting, elegant and difficult to like or even understand, she is snobbish, stylish and witty but also, like all Ibsen’s female characters trapped like a trap in a trap in a world that offers her no freedom. She continually denies the inevitable. Tim McInnerny’s Judge is as sleazy and self-motivated as needs be and contrasted to the virtuous other characters stands as Hedda's equal. Zoe Waites as Mrs Elstead brings a vulnerable timidity to her role and Aunt Juju played delightfully oddly by Anna Carteret is a delight, part Nurse Ratchet, part Mrs Danvers; there’s a delightfully obsessive, empty and compulsive side to her need for an invalid in her life.

There’s so much death in this play, and Hedda is surrounded by it.  She manipulates and toys with the lives of others simply because she can and also because she finds no joy in her own life. Her power is so great, and all the other characters in love or fearful admiration of her that her destruction brings down destruction on them all. It’s unintentionally funny in parts but then that’s the case with Ibsen these days, but the play left me thoughtful and slightly depressed like the stale and decaying scent, to quote Hedder of "one's bouquet the day after a ball".

Mr Hootman adds:
I tend to think of Ibsen in terms of dour, late nineteenth-century Scandinavian gloom. Hedda Gabler is the opposite of the evening I feared being a rollicking melodrama which has barely a dull moment. There's pistol-shooting, hair pulling, domestic violence, book burning, and, one of my favourite theatrical tropes, crazed piano playing used to indicate craziness.

Hedda is trapped in a loveless marriage to dull academic Tesman (Robert Glenister). She's already had an affair with Tesman's rival, Loevborg (Colin Tierney) who is having a relationship with an ex-school friend of Hedda's, Mrs Elvsted (Zoe Waites). Then there's Judge Brack, an old flame of Hedda's, who wants to to sleep with her even though she's married, and is not above using blackmail to get his evil way. Tim McInnerny gives Brack his customary blend of charismatic devilishness which is always a joy to watch.

The plot is frenetic with dramatic revelations coming so regularly I'm reminded just how near tragedy and farce really are.

As a whole the play does, of course, hinge on how the audience feels towards its tragic heroine. Though heroine's a bit of a stretch for a former school bully who is manipulative, cruel and generally unpleasant to everyone. She starts off making pettily cruel comments about a maiden aunt's hat, and finishes by destroying one man's life work on a whim and, almost as an afterthought persuading him to commit suicide. She even gives him a pistol just to make sure he'll go through with it.

It's interesting that such an unsympathetic character completely carries the play. Rosamund Pike gives a wonderfully imperious performance as Hedda which means that even though you won't love her, it's very hard not to admire her.

Continues until Saturday 13.

To book tickets visit:
www.ambassadortickets.com/1557/664/Brighton/Theatre-Royal-Brighton/Hedda-Gabler