Theatre

Hedda Gabler

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow

Neil Cooper

Five stars

The honeymoon is well and truly over by the time we meet the new Mrs Tesman in Kathy McKean’s fresh version of Henrik Ibsen’s seismic drama, which burst on stage in 1891 to mark the beginning of the end of the 19th century in explosive fashion.

McKean’s script is a similarly intense affair, especially confined as it is here in Gordon Barr’s up close and personal Bard in the Botanics production to the ornate surroundings of the Botanic Gardens’ Kibble Palace.

Here, the Palace becomes the aspirational des res the Tesmans now call home, and where Isabelle Joss’ Aunt Julia’ marks her territory by way of her attempt to find a place for everything and put everything in its place. As the roaring boys come calling on the object of their affections they used to know as a bad girl called Hedda Gabler, however, the house’s barely lived in interior will soon be forever marked by tragedy, death and destruction.

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The latter is instigated by Hedda herself, played here with furious intent by the magnificent Nicole Cooper, who last teamed up with McKean and Barr in 2022 as an equally mighty Medea.

With the boredom simply too much, Cooper’s Hedda strides around her drawing room like a wild animal trying to smash her way out of the domestic cage she has built for herself with Sam Stopford’s nice but dull academic, George Tesman.

As her past comes knocking in the form of her old friend Thea, James Boal’s scheming Judge Brack and Graham Mackay-Bruce’s mercurial Lovburg, Hedda is like a fireball on heat, ping-ponging around at high speed, destroying everything in her path.

She is simply too clever, too funny and too full of lust for life than to stay a writer’s moll the rest of her days. If she is going to go down, she is sure as hell going to take everyone with her, in a devastating study of a woman who calls the shots, but who only has one way out.