Ostermeier's Hedda

            

The production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler that truly enraptured me was the one by Thomas Ostermeier of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, of which he became Artistic Director in 1999.  I saw it at BAM Harvey late in 2006, performed in German in a compact translation by Hinrich Schmidt-Hinkel (two hours without intermission).  The set, designed by Jan Palppelbaum, was a glass-walled modernist interior. Ostermeier set the play in this present-day residence and populated it with smartly dressed young admirers of Hedda, played by a petite gamine, Katharina Schüttler, who acted the character as suffering her ennui more passively than Ibsen had portrayed her but effectively in the director’s overall conception.  I attended the interview with Ostermeier that preceded the performance.  Asked about the idea underlying his adaptation, he said that it started with the visit to Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and hearing, in the tour of the house, about Mrs. Farnsworth’s discomfort with the house’s transparency, her desire to place bookshelves against some of the glass walls, and the architect’s adamant objection.  This, he said, made him think of Hedda’s vulnerability in being overexposed to her admirers and the ensuing anxiety, which he associated with the plight of the middle class in contemporary Germany suffering from the fear of downfall from the position of material stability.  The scene was, indeed, fraught with fragility as the characters, scattered both outside and inside at different times,  were seen reflectively sometimes from inside out and at other times outside in, as the set revolved for scene changes.  In addition, the polished floor and the slanted mirror overhead reflected the actions in uneasy inversion, adding to the feeling of instability in the relationships among the characters.  The updating to early 21st century is complete in the substitution of Lovborg’s manuscript which Hedda throws into the fire in the original is a computer file and she destroys it by hammering the laptop it is stored in.  Ostermeier earlier adapted A Doll’s House, and his version of An Enemy of the People was brought to BAM in 2013.  In the course of six years, I saw three other productions of Hedda Gabler, featuring Kate Burton (Nicholas Martin, dir.), Elizabeth Marvel (Ivo van Hove, dir.), and Cate Blanchett (Andrew Upton, dir.).  They were good in different ways in portraying the heroine; but as a production this was the most memorable.