Cover of Hedda Gabler (Plays for Performance) “There is not one of the Ibsen’s characters who is not, in the old phrase, the temple of the Holy Ghost, and who does not move you at the movement by the sense of that mystery.” (G. B. Shaw) In a gallery of startling portraits of female character, Henrik Ibsen ’s Hedda Gabler nonetheless stands out. Mercurial, attractive, and cursed with frustrated ambition, Hedda is both victim and victimizer. Arguably, no other female character that makes the role of Hedda so challenging for actresses and directors. To audiences she presents a similar challenge, showing us several faces that, while different, are harmonized within the complexity of her character. Hedda is study in psycho-social repression. She is also Circe, a demonic force. Ibsen, at the height of his dramatic powers when he wrote the play, resists easy explanation for the various catastrophes Hedda engenders. Like Shakespeare, he teases us with too many motives or, ...
