Lee Hye-young’s more muted Hedda Gabler takes some joy out of Ibsen

Hedda Gabler

National Theater Company of Korea
Drama Centre Theatre
May 28, 8pm

Australian director Simon Stone once told this reviewer that Korean actors have a mania about them particularly suited for plays of collapse or internal turmoil.

Where some cultures might choose temperance, Koreans have a greater fluidity between suffering and joy, manifesting in the sudden yelp, a caricatured curling of the lips or the violent smack to the back of the head in K-dramas.

National Theater Company of Korea’s Hedda Gabler, helmed by artistic director Park Jeong-hee, is recognisably in this vein – with the conspicuous exception of the titular manipulator played by Lee Hye-young.

Like most contemporary productions of Henrik Ibsen’s classic, the femme fatale’s witchiness has been dialled down for a portrait of a more flesh-and-blood “female Hamlet”, trialling chaos on a whim for reasons of domestic boredom and existential ennui.

But in comparison to the default mode of Lee’s counterparts – prone to overreactive outbursts – her madness cannot help but feel not just quite mad enough.

When she starts a fire, it is quick and perfunctory. Hedda’s unspooling over the night never quite extends beyond facial tics. Even her menace in bullying unfortunate house guest Thea Elvsted feels put on.

Park and Lee may have wanted to cast Hedda Gabler as just one among an ensemble of psychotic characters or see her as a reasonable product of society’s limiting of avenues for women in search of purpose. But Lee’s unchanging languidity also takes the joy and charismatic tension out of Ibsen.

It feels a waste, for Lee is otherwise extremely watchable and every bit the wry, slinky bewitcher of so many male suitors. Her more quiet performance moves her just a step out of joint with the others – a woman isolated in her own tragedy whose turmoil is all internal.

The prime mover is that Hedda Gabler, daughter of a general, is now married, and possibly with child. Ibsen’s tale follows the new Tesman household, with George Tesman (Kim Myeong-ki) the “good, gentle and even pitiful” mediaeval historian who prefers combing through manuscripts on his honeymoon. He later reveals a pattern of excusing his own failures by diving into causes that are not his own.

Meanwhile, new suitors and old flames circle vulture-like.

The smart, patient Judge Brack (a wonderful Hong Seon-woo) throws a party to lead men astray.

The rakish Eilert Lovborg, played somewhat bumbling-ly by Kim Eun-woo, returns at just the right moment to be cast under Hedda’s spell. He is a macro-historian crucially carrying around a manuscript of his magnum opus on the future, the kind of man who ignores counter-evidence to see broad strokes in history and so uniquely vulnerable to Hedda’s fatal goading to find “courage”.

There is a gun waved around, which will go off to do Chekhov proud.

Costume directors Sim Na-rae and Shin Eun-hye have nailed the personality of each man perfectly – Eilert in corduroy and boot-cut jeans; Judge Brack a pin-striped three-piece, suavely oversized; and George who frequently looks like he has just rolled out in his pyjamas.

Hedda pulls the strings in a “dream house” that turns out is not really her dream at all. The set nails this aspect.

With its metallic sheen, overhanging wall feature and hideous sculpture, it looks as expensive as it is impersonally designed. The whiskey on the cabinet is for appearances and goes untouched; the characters drink mostly punch and Hedda, not at all.

Unlike the men, she needs no liquid courage to take a wrecking ball to the life she has involuntarily fallen into. “I’ve often thought there’s only one thing in the world I’m any good at. Boring myself to death,” she says with a sigh. A life of passiveness finally pushes her into staring this boredom down the barrel of a gun.

This is a faithful rendition of Ibsen’s dialogue-heavy classic that never quite indulges the audience’s desire for schadenfreude or chaos, and which ultimately fails to break out of the conventionality of its source material.

Book It/Hedda Gabler

Where: Drama Centre Theatre, 100 Victoria Street
When: May 28 and 29, 8pm; and May 30, 2pm
Admission: $48 and $68
Info: str.sg/wwkUH