Wilson shines in Ibsen classic
It’s 10 years since Ruth Wilson rose to prominence playing Jane Eyre in a much-admired BBC series. Since then she has gone from strength to strength in a range of demanding, complex roles: on stage, starring as Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie opposite Jude Law at the Donmar and on TV bringing intelligence and unpredictable emotion to the part of psychopath Alice Morgan on Luther while making it in the US as Alison, one half of the adulterous couple in The Affair, for which she won a Golden Globe.
Now, aged 34, she takes on Ibsen’s most finely wrought anti-heroine Hedda Gabler, the model of destructive marital discontent, in a production that marks the debut at the National of fast-ascending Belgian director Ivo van Hove. Although I admired his stripped-back production of A View from the Bridge a few years ago I have remained pretty agnostic about his supposed exceptionality. Yet with this smartly conceived and surprisingly understated reading of an overfamiliar classic – lent a fresh translation by Patrick Marber – I have now joined the converts. This is a bold, clear, finally harrowing account of the play.
And if I wasn’t a Wilsonite – I certainly am now; she is sensational. Sensational might suggest “showy”, but Wilson’s gift is to keep us watching when she is almost a bystander. At the start, she’s already in situ at a piano, tinkling away, her back to us. She might as well be somewhere else as others walk and talk around her minimally furnished apartment that is the home for herself and her newly-wed academic bore of a husband Tesman.
Barefoot, in négligée and dressingrobe, she detests her surroundings and him; and confides as much. But the beauty of the performance is it catches shifting attitudes; there’s a scoffing aloofness and recklessness but also a subtle softness, brought out in reveries of better times and solitary interludes when we hear the melancholy sound of Joni Mitchell’s Blue.
If this is more of a morgue than a marital nest (how sexlessly the pair sit next to each other on the sofa) she half-relishes the anguish of confinement. When it transpires that Kyle Soller’s brasher-than-usual Tesman may not be getting his promotion, she goes on a wrecking spree – tipping buckets of flowers all over the floor, staple-gunning some to the walls. For Hedda, destruction can be an act of creation – is this trapped housewife a conceptual artist manquée?
What is vile in her – wrecking the manuscript and thereby the life of her brilliant-minded former beau Lovborg (an intense Chukwudi Iwuji) – acquires a saving logic. She’s after something unsullied – and the crude, coercive possessiveness of Rafe Spall’s suave, sleazy Judge Brack doesn’t only force her to a place where her revolver is her only friend it also lends her a contrasting nobility.
I’ve already run out of space, and likewise, right at the eleventh hour, we’re being presented with one of the performances and productions of the year.