I THE SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE

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REVIEW: HUGH SPENCER THEATRE DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN behind THE NEWS Tuesday, November INGMAR BERGMAN'S production of "Hedda Gabler', which has just moved from the Cambridge Theatre to the Old Vic, is a refreshing departure from the usual English interpretation of the Scandinavian play. wright Henrik Ibsen.

Well known for "The Seventh Silence', Bergman has avoided saturating minentdoom that is sense usually found lingering in every heavy black drape and longfaced actor, so often a reflection of that mystique the English feel about those strange ice-bound lands.

With the help of a very capable designer, Mago, Bergman has stripped away cumbersome settings, stage ornamentations, unnecessary furniture, leaving merely the essentials.

These are placed economically within stage area painted entirely in red.

In contrast to this his players are dressed simply in a way. in which they are no longer dwarted by their surrounds, but, are, in fact, enlarged and projected for. ward by it.

At the same time this red surround can seem to reflect many things: plush and rich, yet sticky and claustrophobic; raw like a large open wound revealing what is going on inside.

In this way we are able to concern ourselves with the actions of the players within this context. We can now clearly recognize the heroes of Ibsen's play to be what they are-the petty bourgeois: the same whatever the language or the country; lost, confused and utterly pessimistic.

The play is set in the fashionable end of a provincial conservative town where scandals, seductions and grime seem to be the life-blood.

Here Ibsen unpeels the complex and contradictory processes to be found in the relationships of his characters.

George Tesman and Ejlert Loeyborg are both research scholars in history.

Limitations

The former is a dry academic, whose cowardice forces him capitulate to the limitations of the society he finds himself in and use his brain solely as an instrument to better his position as a respectable academic.

The latter is a creative intellectual whose despair consolation of drink, and Both ho hare sas sides the coin, and, although their actions and inBoth Capable ree sin in character, in as much the conflicts and processes the play manifest themselves in and around her.

She is the femme fatale of the town, the daughter of a late General, from whom she inherited arrogance, authority, a sense of destiny, perhaps, and his 'matching' pistols.

She, like all the characters, is a frustrated coward, unable to make love to Loevborg, unable to shoot him when he leaves her, unable to take on any responsibility or face any reality that detracts from her morbid obsession with 'the purposelessness of life' in at her eatonia with ober people. So she becomes utterly destructive to anything around her.

When the reformed Loevborg re-enters her life with his new manuscript she sets in motion the process by which he will destroy his reason and return to the bottle.

In a state of drunkeness he loses the manuscript, which finds its way back to Hedda.

Twisted

Utterly twisted by the kn IOW edge that she now Car rrie lesman's child, she desti roy: oevborg's manuscript — so ime hing inspired in Loevbors nother woman; their 'child' Unable to be a life-gir nspiration, she reverses ev hing and hopes that Loevt will now destroy himself il beautiful' suicide for the s if the lost manuscript and When he discovers the ma cript gone, she hands istol. We later hear • that nas gone off in his poc vounding him in the groin le bleeds to death.

Cheated of this last dream earing a dreadful scandal, H shoots her brains out.

Another character who fl through this complex deceit and illusions. is Ji Brack, whom Ibsen calls representative of,. bourg society.

A Slimy character, he Hedda as destrable, but unat able, and. Tesman as a b fool.

Posing as a friend of lamily, he wheedles himself a position where he can i passes at Hedda with no of any kind of involvement.

To protect his position wi ithin instrumental in the destruc he is indire ectly What Bergman has achieved is to reveal Ibsen's idealism.

Ibsen felt himself a suppressed vriter who had to rebel 'against convention'.

We see the failure of this form of protest expressed in the despair and pessimism of the play, resulting the deaths of Loevborg and Gabler.

E Prish precance in 18 s interesting in that they found it ludicrous, horrible, tedious, "a crawl with the foulest passions of humanity.

This is a violent and self-righteous reaction to what was no doubt the mirror image to their own society.

For all Ibsen's limitations and pessimism, he created very profound pictures of the perversion of human relationships within bourgeois society. MAGGIE S as Hedda 1 JEREMY B as George Tesman. NNE WATT Miss Tesma JEREMY BRETT nave Terman