Frilansjournalisten Raphaëlle Tchamitchian intervjuade Heddas regissör Aurore Fattier och dramatikern Sébastien Monfè. Intervjun gjordes i november 2022.
Hedda is an original piece inspired by Hedda Gabler by Ibsen. How did the project come about?
Aurore Fattier: Hedda Gabler is a play that has fascinated me for a long time, but I couldn’t imagine telling another story about a woman’s tragic fate – Hedda Gabler is a very young bride who kills herself while pregnant – to today’s audience, in particular women. How can we fight against our own tendency to revert to the past and offer new narratives and different kinds of characters? The starting point for Hedda is the crisis of depicting this character, and the great female figures of classic theatre as well, through a mise en abyme of the process of creating a theatrical work. With that in mind, I asked Sébastien Monfè, my long-time collaborator and dramaturge, to write a play about a contemporary female director working on Ibsen’s play, in order to place the character of Hedda Gabler at a distance and diffract it through different portraits of women with their own contemporary personal issues.
Sébastien Monfè: Initially, Hedda is an exploration of the eponymous character and the story of Hedda Gabler’s rewrite. You can make out fragments of Ibsen’s play, but it is not the same piece. It is a polymorphic, realist and baroque text, with twists and turns, mirrors and ghosts – a kind of psychological thriller that resembles Japanese fantasy-horror films.
Before Hedda Gabler, you had already adapted Phèdre and Othello. Can you talk about your long-term work on classics?
Sébastien Monfè: They say that the classics are universal, but, more than anything, they are works we have been brought up with. And, because they are part of our education, we reproduce them, so they become universal to us. The classics demonstrate social structures and primarily depict pyramidal power structures, whether they be bourgeois, aristocratic or divine. They have educational value. The Greek tragedies that we know were passed down to us by the Romans; they are the ones that were copied and taught in Roman schools. It was an academic corpus. The best ones were not passed down to us, as is commonly believed, but those that were easy to teach. In a good classic, characters are ‘open’, meaning they act like empty shells, ready to accommodate just about any contemporary psychological profile. They are matrices of our identities.
When confronted with these texts, you realize that art precedes existence. Long before we were born, Ibsen – and many others – crafted types of individuals that still exist to this day.
Aurore Fattier: Because of that, Hedda Gabler is a figure who has founded our representation of womanhood in theatre and art since the 19th century. I am not sure if there has been such a major evolution in the psychological depiction of women since Ibsen. Hedda Gabler has become a model of a bourgeois housewife in crisis, as represented through the filter of a patriarchal gaze that is still at work today. It is a precursor portrait to the feminist critique of the 1960s.
Sébastien Monfè: Theatre gives centre stage to monsters, by which I mean figures that are simultaneously fascinating and repugnant, and the character of Hedda Gabler is a perfect example of this. Theatre is interested in monsters by humanising them. It has a penchant for evil, while understanding and redeeming it. In the time in which she lived, someone like Hedda Gabler was certainly not listened to, but Ibsen took the time to look at her more closely.
Have you created a feminist play?
Aurore Fattier: We have created a play that is deeply interested in women, in as sincere a manner as possible, and that incorporates all of the contradictions that can come with being a woman. In that sense, it is a feminist play. On the other hand, it undermines trendy feminist ideals, such as empowerment or sisterhood. It does not present a model of a warrior or a brilliant woman. There is a lot of violence… Not everything is positive. There is no ideology, but there is an interest in honesty and realism about being a woman today. One of the challenges was to ensure that our main character, Laura, was in control of her life, compared to Hedda Gabler. She works. She is involved in the action. In addition to Laure, we are interested in female characters of different ages, from 25 to 60, and their relationship to desire, sexuality, power, men, motherhood and more. Hedda Gabler is one of the very rare plays in the classical repertoire that tackles the issue of motherhood directly. Is being a woman the same as being a mother? In our show, we transposed this question to the idea of creation, by making Laure a director.
The character of Laure is haunted by the ghost of her sister, who is strangely present throughout the show …
Aurore Fattier: One of the main themes of Hedda is how the dead shape the lives of the living. How are the dead present in the minds of those who remain? From a theatrical point of view, how do actors, who convey life, interact with these characters who are destined to die? The theatre introduces a very unique interplay between life and death. In a way, theatre characters are always ghosts. They are frozen in time and brought back to life ten, twenty or one hundred years later. The Odéon is an old space steeped in history: lots of actresses have played Hedda Gabler there (which is what makes the role so fantastic by the way!). It comes back to life through subsequent retellings. Our play involves a poetic intersection between fictional ghosts and the ghosts of the theatre.
Sébastien Monfè: One of the features of ghosts is that they do not have a defined shape; they have shifting features. A ghost can change their face and still remain themselves. In this setting, there is no difference between a dead person and a character. Hedda Gabler can be played differently by one or two hundred actresses, who lead her to her death every night, only to play her again the next day and remain the same. Theatre is a machine for anthropological study that has 2,500 years of history behind it. It highlights relationships with reality that other humanities, such as literature, psychology, economics, etc., do not necessarily allow. In particular, it very clearly demonstrates the way in which each living person carries around the dead, as if a part of us were alive and dead at the same time.
By filming the actors in close-up, the camera pans between the stage, the backstage area and the dressing rooms of the theatre where Laure is directing Hedda Gabler. Can you discuss this use of video?
Aurore Fattier: We tried to create, alongside video creator Vincent Pinckaers, a language that is both cinematic and theatrical. First, we use a single static shot that allows the audience to simultaneously see the dressing rooms and the hidden space on the stage, which is showcased on the screen above. This framework is quite restrictive for the actors, who must ‘enter’ it. The camera then becomes mobile and we move towards a language that resembles the movies of Lars von Trier, with the camera held on the shoulder and very close shots. By moving from a one-dimensional view to a multi-dimensional view, the camera becomes the living eye of the viewer walking into the theatre. This can cause a certain degree of disorientation since you are walking through the corridors without knowing exactly where you are. Furthermore, as the camera moves increasingly close to faces and feelings, the theatrical element becomes cinematic, which is less physical and more tenuous.
In Hedda, the theatre is pared down to the most everyday details, since much of the show presents life during rehearsals.
Aurore Fattier: It is always easier to talk about what you know, but the world of theatre can be of interest to anyone because it is primarily about interpersonal relationships and work. What we see are relationships between a father and his daughter, people in a relationship, a team working together to create something, relationships between a collective and individuals, etc. And then material life: mobile phones, taking care of the kids on weekends, that sort of thing. The further we go, the more we want to tell stories that talk about everyday life: to use theatre to show the banality, triviality and material aspect of our contemporary existences. Here, we also present the doubts that anyone can have about the usefulness and meaning of their work, about the potential disparity between the hopes we had when we were kids and what we have really accomplished, etc. We conducted a sort of study about our profession by observing the people around us, and we critiqued ourselves. We are quite cruel with our world and with ourselves, but this show has an unconditional love for the theatre. It is obviously by criticizing the theatre that we love it the most.
Sébastien Monfè: It is a game of chiaroscuro: the saddest pieces can be conveyed with power, vitality and incredible generosity. Humanity is complicated!
Interview by Raphaëlle Tchamitchian
