By Faye Tang

Shooting Hedda Gabler is delightfully meta. Two American actors, scandal-ridden Hollywood stars, and exes to boot, make their way to a remote Norwegian camp where a ‘genius’ director Henrik is shooting Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Snow is falling hard and fast, and the Scandinavians (with very convincing accents!) are no warmer.

The stage is split into two levels: a traditional stage below the audience, and an overhanging ramp above, in which actors lounge and pace, in-character, while people filter in through the doors. This is the first hint of metatheatrical play. Two older women seated in front of me stirred and pointed when Ejlert (Alpha Sylla) groaned, drunk and draped over the theatre’s scaffolding, his shoe swinging just metres away from where we were settling into our seats after intermission. All of this metatheatre circles around the struggle to interpret Hedda Gabler for the twenty-first century.

In 1971, stylish and clear-sighted critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote that Hedda Gabler is a woman with no core, a character driven most of all by a deep-seated emptiness in her soul. She is a Philistine, “reared by a general on pistols and horses.” She wants something bright and vital from life but she doesn’t know how to want it; she marries a tepid unbrilliant academic whom she doesn’t love and realises she has nothing to do and nothing to live for. “The cave of nothingness which she has gradually entered seems to leave only a dull resentment alive,” Hardwick writes. Her pettiness, her maliciousness, her morbidity all arise from spontaneous propagation. Something twisted emerges from nothing.

If Hardwood is to be believed, then Shooting Hedda Gabler’s Jennifer Rani is right when she yells that she’s not the Hedda that she plays—she’s not cold and hard, malice stirring at every turn. Whereas we know very little about Ibsen’s Hedda and the origins of her pettiness, Rani’s Hedda fits into archetypes that are invariably recognisable in 2026: she’s a previous child star, exploited and betrayed by the Hollywood machine; a prudish American soul-searching in Europe; a celebrity approaching middle-age, desperate to prove her worth to a system that worships the cult of youth.

With these cultural touchpoints and a tragic backstory, Rani’s Hedda is humanised in a way that Ibsen’s is not. There is a traceable reason for every single one of her violent actions. It becomes easy to imagine myself in her shoes. Yes, if I were coerced in this way, abused in that, I, too, would hurt someone just to prove I had control over something, anything. James Smithers’ Henrik becomes the cold-hearted beauty-hungry enigma that Hedda was supposed to be. Henrik is not quite human, striding around the stage with his clear, hawkish stare that travels through to your core, breaking into fits of anger and guffaws of malicious delight entirely unpredictably. Smithers is always compelling, endlessly astonishing—and that’s where my belief in the production’s #MeToo-allegory must be suspended. The play seems to believe too earnestly in Henrik’s intense ‘genius’ to offer a satisfying take on the sordid nepotic industry men who abused their employees.

Jane Angharad’s Berta is startling, played with lots of wit and even more heart. She’s the moral pulse of the performance, the guiltily absent mother, the overworked employee, the only one who believes that the aesthetic compass should be mitigated by the moral. Alpha Sylla’s Ejlert is a classic himbo, endearing and tragic, and like any fool worth his salt, gives the most accurate self-reflexive reading—the genre of his story is, indeed, horror. Lib Campbell and Matthew Abotomey are hilarious as Jörgen and Thea, drawing laughs from the audience at every quip and gaffe, providing much-needed relief.

Monica Sayers’ Director’s Note asks many questions, and her production asks even more. It demands you to engage with the difficult relationship between art and her sometimes lover, morality, but the play does it so effortlessly, so well, that it’s compulsively watchable and always surprising.