HEDDA GABLER PB B FORMAT – HENRIK IBSEN-DAVID THOMAS-MICHAEL MEYER

Hedda is an intelligent and ambitious woman, trapped in the stifling environment of a bourgeois 19th-century marriage. When writer Eilert Loevborg, an old flame returns to Hedda s life with a masterpiece that might threaten her husband s career, Hedda decides to take drastic and fatal action. Universally condemned in 1890 when it was written, Hedda Gabler has since become one of Ibsen s most frequently performed plays. Its title role is elusive and complex: Hedda is an intelligent and ambitious woman, who has no means of finding personal fulfilment in the stifling world of late nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Too frightened of scandal to become involved with a brilliant, wayward writer, she opts for a conventional but loveless marriage in the hope of finding surrogate satisfaction through her husband s career. Blending comedy and tragedy disconcertingly together, Ibsen probes the thwarted aspirations and hidden anxieties of his characters against a background of contemporary social conditions and attitudes.