Culture Shock: Why Hedda Gabler ain’t messing with no broke Norwegians

Hedda Gabler doesn't pass the Bechdel test. Yes, it has more than two significant female roles. Yes, two of those female characters talk to each other. But, no, they don't talk about any subject other than a man – the man they both desire.

Although it fails Alison Bechdel’s handy guide for determining gender bias in movies (along with roughly half of all films) and falls short of Virginia Woolf’s similar hopes for literature that does not define female characters “in their relation to men”, Henrik Ibsen’s 1890 play is still one of the most provocative pieces about gender politics in the canon.

Some will bristle, with good cause, to consider Hedda Gabler as a feminist icon. For a start, she’s a sociopath. She is pointedly cruel to weaker mortals: her idiotically intellectual new husband, his besotted aunt, her former lover, his drip of a muse, the domestic staff. She has no moral responsibility to speak of, finding children and the sick repulsive. She does little other than shop, actually. I hesitate to call her a gold-digger, but, as Kanye West almost put it, she ain’t messing with no broke Norwegians.

She never even manages to leave the house, which even Ibsen's Nora finally does in A Doll's House, and has recently lost the right to her name. (She is now Hedda Tessman, she reminds her visitors.) So why should a character who is so psychotically bored that she would kill to feel alive – both symbolically and actually – be considered a thoroughly modern heroine?

Simple: we created this monster.

"A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society . . . that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view." That is Ibsen, in the late 19th century, delivering a dispiritingly necessary mansplanation. The original production of Hedda Gabler was met with hoots of derision from male critics (female critics were noticeably kinder), who preferred their female characters contentedly domestic, less handy with a firearm, and more immediately understandable. But so much has changed since then.

Here is a successful female screenwriter, speaking a couple of years ago, about writing female characters for predominantly female audiences: “You have to defeat her at the beginning. It’s a conscious thing I do – abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity, and then she gets to live out our fantasies and have fun. It’s as simple as making the girl cry, 15 minutes into the movie.” According to the focus-grouped, test-marketed logic of Hollywood, mainstream audiences won’t relate to that competent rocket scientist or kooky brain surgeon until they have been rendered “relatable” – somewhere between unthreatening and pathetic. Is ours a society where a woman can be herself?

I first met Hedda on the Abbey stage in 1991, when Fiona Shaw played the prowling general’s daughter for the director Deborah Warner. It is the first grown-up play I remember seeing. (My mother took me.) She returned in Thomas Ostermeier’s slyly updated version for the Schaubühne in 2006, during Dublin Theatre Festival. She has never stopped being surprising, or terrifying, whether urging a vulnerable man towards an awful act in a plush drawing room or smashing a laptop into 1,000 pieces while The Beach Boys sing an ethereal harmony.

And she is about to return to the Abbey. Mark O'Rowe, who has written a new version of the play, may count as another unlikely feminist. Let's not recall the plot of his early play Anna's Ankle, but suffice it to say Anna doesn't even have a supporting part. If his gruesomely bleak play Crestfall – which depicts women as mothers, virgins or whores – passes the Bechdel test, it's only on some alarming technicality. But following the ultranaturalism in Our Few and Evil Days he budges Ibsen so subtly that the play gets deeper into Hedda's head, which is where it was aiming all along. Nothing worries Hedda quite as much as "people": what they do, what they say, what they think. For good reason, too. People are always scrutinising her, judging her and deploring her, played – in a wicked bit of casting – by the audience.

If Hedda is an antiheroine for our times, it seems fair to ask, in as loaded terms as possible, if O’Rowe is the man for the job. The Abbey’s last production, then under the artistic direction of Garry Hynes, used Una Ellis-Fermor’s translation, but, in an irony that won’t escape her, Hedda remains male property. (Brian Friel bought her back to the Gate in 2008.) That may compound theatre’s institutional sexism. In the past 70 years four female playwrights had work produced on the Abbey’s stage – Elaine Murphy, Marina Carr, Jean Binnie and Elizabeth Connor – and when four new plays by Irish women were staged consecutively at the Peacock, in 2011, it was touted as a record-breaking streak.

Hedda hardly fixes this, and you don’t need to be an expert in Freudian phallic symbols to see this gun-toting psycho as a product of a distinctly male anxiety. But Hedda is still armed and dangerous and pointing her pistols at us. It’s a legitimate protest. She’s not a feminist, but . . .