Updating Ibsen's Hedda Gabler for the 21st century is a risk. Without the social and economic imperatives of 19th-century Norway, it becomes that little less plausible that the snobbish, intelligent Hedda should have married the struggling academic Tesman at all, whatever his prospects of promotion.
Following his radical A Doll's House, German director Thomas Ostermeier has his modern-day Hedda (Katharina Schuttler) moping about in a slick cubist Berlin flat, all shimmering glass walls and reflective ceiling.
She's a stay-at-home wife so contemptuous of her nerdish husband she can barely stand near him and so bored she plays listlessly with pistols for fun and takes a hammer to the laptop containing a groundbreaking manuscript belonging to her husband's rival, Eilert Lovborg.
At least one presumes she acts out of boredom - certainly ennui seeps into every crevice of Ostermeier's surprisingly muted production. Either that or it's latent psychopathy: waves of unpredictable violence simmer dangerously beneath the flat, glimmering surfaces.
With its wistful Beach Boys soundtrack, Ostermeier's production has an ironic detachment that sends up the spiritual emptiness of Ibsen's bourgeois characters without letting the audience feel that they know them.
His tense, minimalist take may be unsettling but it's also reductive. Schuttler's Hedda is no trapped live wire burning up inside but a hollow cipher.
It's telling that the final scene should be presented not as tragedy but bleak, black comedy. It's a shock, but it leaves you utterly unmoved.
Hedda Gabler
Barbican Theatre
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
