Triumphant tragedy and splendid survival
Reviews
Hedda Gabler, Botanic Gardens, Glasgow
Life of Pi, Theatre Royal, Glasgow
By Mark Brown
It is some years now since the annual Bard in the Botanics (BiB) mini-festival expanded beyond its moniker and started staging classic plays beyond the oeuvre of the Man of Stratford. Audiences who are lucky enough to see this carefully truncated version of Henrik Ibsen’s great tragedy Hedda Gabler (which is performed in the glorious Kibble Palace glasshouse at the Botanic Gardens) will be glad that this remarkable summer season chose to widen its repertoire.
This version (which runs to 105 minutes, without an interval) – which is adapted by the talented Kathy McKean and directed by BiB’s artistic director Gordon Barr – is unforgettably intense. As one has come to expect of this festival – which never fails to punch above its meagrely-funded weight – the production succeeds brilliantly in evoking the suffocating social conditions of bourgeois Kristiania (Oslo) in the late-19th century.
In significant part, this is down to the remarkable, atmospheric possibilities of the Kibble. With only a minimal (but unerringly appropriate) contribution from Barr as designer, the Victorian venue stands in beautifully for a grand room in the capacious home purchased by rising academic George Tesman for his beautiful, spirited, but restless young wife Hedda Gabler.
From the outset, the walking-on-eggshells awkwardness of the visit of Tesman’s Aunt Julia – whose bourgeois pleasantries are trashed comprehensively by the barely-disguised contempt of the newly-wed Hedda – one can sense the tightly-compressed tension of Ibsen’s play. Barr and his universally excellent cast understand the drama for what it is, a tragedy which – despite, or, rather, because of the seeming niceties of social convention – is as devastating as any conceived by the Ancient Greeks.
The production strives relentlessly (and remorselessly) towards the essence of Ibsen’s tragedy: namely, the collision of the unstoppable force of Hedda Gabler (anguished, passionate and irrepressible) and the immovable object of bourgeois, Scandinavian social mores. In doing so, Barr’s staging is blessed to have Nicole Cooper in the title role.
Cooper is, surely without question, one of the finest actors currently performing on the Scottish stage. Clever, intuitive, versatile, and possessed of extraordinarily deep reservoirs of emotion, she has been justifiably acclaimed in a startling series of roles (most recently Medea, Lear’s Fool and, in Zinnie Harris’s excellent Macbeth (an undoing), Lady M).
I dare to suggest, however, that, in her playing of the nihilistic heroine Hedda Gabler, this outstanding actress has at least equalled those brilliant, recent achievements. From the get-go, she plays the role with a painful agitation and a burning emotional and erotic restiveness that seems to frighten even the character herself.
In Barr’s tight, powerfully fraught production, Cooper’s Hedda is, entirely correctly, the exploding sun around which the other characters rotate. Every one of them, from Sam Stopford’s hapless Tesman to Graham Mackay-Bruce’s ill-fated Eilert Lovborg (Hedda’s dissolute, seemingly reformed former lover), plays their part brilliantly.
Isabelle Joss doubles excellently as Aunt Julia and the well-intentioned Thea Elvsted, while James Boal is appropriately self-serving as the outwardly civic-minded Judge Brack.
There may be less than two miles between Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens and the Theatre Royal, but the touring production of Life of Pi (which has the financial support of no fewer than three producers) is a world apart from the on-a-shoestring heroics of Bard in the Botanics. This staging (by Sheffield Theatres) of Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Canadian author Yann Martel’s famous 2001 novel is noted for the splendour of both its superb puppets and its impressive projected imagery.
Martel’s multiple award-winning prose fiction (which was adapted, with great success, to the big screen by Ang Lee in 2012) tells the story (or, more accurately, the distinct, but parallel, stories) of Pi, the Indian boy who is believed to be the sole survivor of the sinking of a huge, Japaneses cargo ship. The action of director Max Webster’s staging shifts between the zoo run by Pi’s father in Pondicherry (aka Puducherry) in south-eastern India, a room in a Mexican hospital and the Pacific Ocean.
Interestingly, as the only surviving member of a family that was fleeing the civil unrest and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s draconian State of Emergency in the 1970s, Pi is undeniably a “small boat” refugee. It seems that to be such, and to be welcomed in the UK, one would be well-advised to be a beloved fictional character, rather than a real person in need of sanctuary.
Webster’s production doesn’t editorialise on this point. Nonetheless, when we first meet Pi, the trauma of his survival at sea is expressed in his hiding under his hospital bed.
His grilling by an investigator from Tokyo (who is writing a report on the sinking of the freighter) is pertinently reflective of an insensitivity towards refugee experience on the part of officialdom. Primarily, however, the interrogation takes us to the heart of Martel’s purpose in relation to memory and the uncertain relationship between “fact” and “fiction”.
It is in this conceptual framework that Pi tells his story in which he shares a lifeboat with zoo animals. These, famously, are an injured zebra, an orangutan, a vicious hyena and, of course, (in a joke that never fails to amuse) a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker.
The creatures are represented in fabulously designed, brilliantly manipulated, life-sized puppets (the work of designers Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell). These creations inspire inevitable comparisons with the equine puppets in the ever-popular stage adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse.
The drama of Pi’s survival is enhanced marvellously by Andrzej Goulding’s video effects and the versatility of Tim Hatley’s set designs. A show that relies so heavily on puppetry and special effects is, of course, in danger of making acting secondary.
However, Webster’s production boasts universally strong performances. Divesh Subaskaran’s Pi, in particular is, by turns, impressively mercurial, quick-witted, humorous, fearful and vulnerable.
The production is, of course, a beautifully executed example of theatre as spectacle. However, it is also, crucially, a first-rate piece of theatrical storytelling.
Hedda Gabler plays the Botanic Gardens, Glasgow until July 6: bardinthebotanics.co.uk
Life of Pi plays the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, June 25-29: lifeofpionstage.com
These reviews were originally published in the Sunday National on June 23, 2024
© Mark Brown
Scottish Stage 