Hedda –An Erotic Death Trip (DK)
In Hedda – an erotic death trip the general’s daughter and upper class girl Hedda is taken out of the 19 th century’s plush parlours and placed in a lesbian marriage in 2006.
Directed by Peter Langdal / Betty Nansen Teatret
Husband Tesman is now live-in partner Tessa, a woman who works so hard she has no time left for her own sexuality. Hedda’s childhood friend, the self-sacrificing Thea Elvsted, has also changed sex and become Teo, a “womanly” man, self-effacing and martyrish.
With Hedda – an erotic death trip, director Peter Langdal places one of Ibsen’s best known female characters in the context of a modern, gender fluid, thoroughly sexualised society. Hedda Gabler has become an explorer into gender, body, and sexuality issues. She’s free as a bird – but must pay a steep price for her flight: In freedom lurks loneliness. Behind opportunities awaits boredom. Hedda is both “plastic” and “pure” – she floats through reality with a restless grace, but is finally caught up by her own, fleeting shadows. Hedda insists on happiness, but her rewards are emptiness and doubt. Like a circus princess she dances all over the paradoxes of freedom, she is both curious and indifferent, vulnerable and invulnerable, loving and brutal. A modern woman fleeing sexual stereotypes – yet pregnant with her own downfall.
Peter Langdal is known in Norway for his previous Ibsen Festival productions of The Lady from the Sea and When We Dead Awaken, as well as Hotel Strindberg at last year’s Festival of Contemporary Drama.
Hedda – an erotic death trip premiered in Copenhagen March 2006.
Featuring: Hedda – Sonja Richter, Tesman – Paprika Steen, Løvborg – Shanti Roney, Brack – Tom Jensen, Elvsted – Nikolaj Kopernikus, Julle – Jesper Langberg.