Ingmar Bergman, Hedda Gabler, June 1970 (original) (raw)

Laurence Olivier liked Ingmar Bergman's Hedda Gabler so much he bought the production. At the time Bergman was making some of his greatest films - Hedda Gabler came between Persona (1966) and Cries and Whispers (1973) - but in Sweden he was working hardest as a theatre director. His Stockholm production toured to London in 1968, and two years later, he reprised it with actors from the National Theatre company.

Maggie Smith was playing Ibsen's antiheroine - "a prime hurdle", as the Guardian's Philip Hope-Wallace put it. His only quibbles about Smith's "gripping... ironic, mordant" performance were that "[she] sleeps on her couch with her shoes on... yet sheds this footwear before shooting herself".

The Evening Standard's Milton Shulman was completely won over: "She haunts the stage like some giant portrait by Modigliani, her alabaster skin stretched tight with hidden anguish." The Sunday Times's Harold Hobson recorded a more visceral response: "When she nearly tore out Mrs Elvsted's hair, I jumped out of my seat." In production shots she looks magnificent, already exhibiting the icy languor that would lead the New Yorker's Pauline Kael to nickname her "Our Lady of the Wrists".

But the Observer's Ronald Bryden sounded a warning note, writing that "a naturalistic production would fit most of Maggie Smith's performance better". Others echoed this concern at the mismatch between director and actor. Shulman was unmoved by Bergman's vision of the play as "a blood-shot, brooding nightmare through which the characters glide compulsively to their doom. Their aloofness and their fatalism makes it difficult for an audience to become involved."

The Daily Mail's Peter Lewis disliked the "mesmeric effect of watching insect life under glass", and felt that Smith's habit of "looking at her white, predatory mask of a face in the mirror" made her performance "too self-regarding to be either believable or touching, let alone tragic".

Only Hobson seemed to think Bergman had got it right. "Mr Bergman discovers the real secret of Ibsen lies not in his views, or in the cause he ostensibly champions, but in his metaphors." What got many people steamed up was Bergman's use of what the Illustrated London News's JC Trewin called "passages of mime that illustrate what is called fashionably the sub-text". Hobson thought these sequences "essential". But Trewin thought them "superfluous" and, in Punch, Jeremy Kingston spoke of "a director's idea undermining an intelligent performance".

Smith wasn't altogether happy with the reviews. She told the Evening Standard: "I wish a woman could review the play. She would understand about Hedda." As for the "unfortunate laughter" the Standard's critic had derisively noted, Smith claimed it had come from none other than Tennessee Williams, in town for the opening.

She can't have been thrilled, either, that her husband, Robert Stephens, playing Lovborg, received such poor notices. Shulman felt his Lovborg was "just too shambling a wreck to have written a great book", while the Lady's critic felt that: "Stephens... acts the part in italic capitals."

According to his biographers, Bergman didn't enjoy directing a cast he hadn't chosen, but it didn't put him off theatre. He told an interviewer in 1980 that film-making was "a lousy job" and the stage his real love: "I hope I will have the chance to work with the theatre until they carry me out."