I suppose we should all be grateful to television. The most massive of the mass media has, after all, made it possible for millions of people to see a wide range of dramatic literature – a larger exposure for Shakespeare in one night, say, than Ashland and Stratford together might hope to gain in 10 years. And the Mobil Oil-supported Masterpiece Theatre showings of BBC productions of A Doll’s House (1992) and Hedda Gabler (1993) probably have reached more homes by now (not to mention college English and drama classes, through the magic of pirated video copying) than did Ibsen’s entire output during his 50-year career as playwright and cultural revolutionary.
But our gratitude for this catholic distribution of the drama might be tempered by a quick rewind through some of the offerings: How many of those BBC Shakespeares did you really finish watching? And think about the last televised grand opera you saw. Didn’t it seem faintly ludicrous? Or consider Bette Midler’s turn as Mama Rose in the recent CBS Gypsy: What was she doing in those longish stretches between musical numbers? I, for one, didn’t recognize the activity as anything from the human lexicon.
The common problem here, adduced by someone who loves Shakespeare, the opera and Gypsy, can be located in the nature of the television medium. The small, flat, cold screen; the four-inch speakers; the restrictive point of view of the camera; they all add up to a packaged experience ill-suited to the aesthetic and emotional characteristics of work intended for the stage. These include, but are by no means limited to, the following: heightened language, sharper/bolder/ cruder psychology and motive, simultaneity of event, multiplicity of plot, greater scale of gesture, metaphorical versus literal environment and articulated rather than merely felt passion.
The BBC Ibsens provide vividly contrasting examples of the challenges of getting great stage writing into the little box. A Doll’s House, starring Juliet Stevenson as Nora and directed by David Thacker, goes beyond being handsome and mannerly Masterpiece Television, while Hedda Gabler, with Fiona Shaw in the title role, boldly directed by Deborah Warner, makes little sense either of the play or the medium.
The strengths of Stevenson and Thacker’s effort can be traced to several intelligent decisions. Their text, credited as being “from an original translation by Joan Tindale,” is at once unobtrusively contemporary and attentive to some of Ibsen’s subtle repetitive motifs, such as Nora’s progressively more complex use of the word “wonderful” throughout the play, from its early, materialistic context right up to the famous ending where she hopes in vain for “the most wonderful thing of all.” And the necessary cuts managed not to leave out anything of profound importance.
Another virtue of this production lies in its accommodation to television technique. Responding to the ruling aesthetic of the medium – intimacy – Thacker plays scene after scene in extreme closeup, using delayed over-the-shoulder cut-away shots to relieve the claustrophobia. His camera is a fascinated if somewhat uncomfortable observer in Nora’s private world – she is, after all, on stage or screen for virtually the entire play except when she’s upstairs dancing her tarantella. Even his slightly wider shots are tighter than normal, trapping two actors in a too-close-for-comfort portrait frame, inviting the audience to participate in a kind of formalized voyeurism that is impossible in the comparative expanse of the proscenium stage. We edge closer to see Torvald’s wandering fingers play over Nora’s bodice; we are uncomfortably aware of the extent of Dr. Rank’s decline as his eyes settle with frail heaviness on Nora’s silk stockings; and we are visibly in the way as she practices her tarantella, whirling out of focus in front of the camera, which seems to be trying to back itself into a comer.
Juliet Stevenson’s lively, quirky and supremely human Nora represents one of the most satisfying television performances of a great stage role that I have ever seen, because she maintains the boldness, variety and clean lines of the stage-Nora within the stillness, detail and smaller scale that television enforces. Her declaration of independence from Torvald – from that revolutionary moment that begins, “Come and sit down, Torvald – you and I have a lot to talk about,” through to the final door slam – perfectly captures the sense of a woman who has had a sudden, cataclysmic rush of insight, and now, in the presence of her husband, is in the process of finding words for her entirely new understanding of the world.
Destroyed by her fears
Stevenson avoids two of the more obvious ways to diminish this crucial scene; the “slough of discovery,” in which Nora comes to one painful realization after another like so many light bulbs switching on just over her head, each discovery requiring its own momentum-killing pause; and the “tirade temptation,” which leads many Noras to deliver their triumphant castigation of Torvald as if it is a rehearsed set-piece which had merely lain in wait for the proper cue. Stevenson retains possession of her wits, but the emotional effect of her insights on both husband and wife is manifest. She gives Torvald (affectingly played by Trevor home: “Ten o’clock then.” Not a grand curtain, but aggressively ordinary instead.
Warner’s direction does employ a few bold visual gestures that hint at the potential energy of her stage production, even within the confines of the small screen. The first shot seems to show Hedda crying, then opening her dressing gown to check between her legs for menstrual blood. Finding none – further evidence of a hateful pregnancy – she chokes, rushing to a window to throw open the curtains on a predawn grayness that matches her psyche. There is nothing new in this reading of Hedda’s state of mind, but Warner and Shaw play it with palpable energy and verve, as Hedda passes through terror and frustration into rage and finally a suffocating entrapment: a promising beginning, signaling that something extra-ordinary might be going on.
But for every inspired touch, there are a hundred deadening counterweights. Hedda’s calculated insult to Aunt Julie about “the maid’s old hat” seems like a little bit of household discomfort instead of the high comedy moment it might be, and this makes hash out of Hedda’s later protestation to Judge Brack that “these things just come over me.” We never see Hedda manipulate Thea – all reference to the younger woman’s “irritating hair” is gone, along with Hedda’s once-and-future threat to burn it off. Even her all-too-deliberate mistake with her visitor’s name – Thora for Thea – seems like a real honest bit of confusion, and she seems genuinely sorry for it. This is a domesticated Hedda indeed.
Synthesis of forms
The sum of these diminishing choices is a Hedda whose boredom is real (in that pseudo-Chekhovian sense that finally doesn’t serve Chekhov either), but whose soul seems more at home with Tesman and Thea and even the caddish but stultifying Judge Brack than with the fallen Dionysian, Lovborg. Her suicide, therefore, seems unearned, the accidental coda to a life of accumulated small mistakes rather than a sudden seismic shock to a world grown too sure of its smug and tedious serenity.
And for that, I aver, we partly have television to blame. I can’t imagine these artists making Hedda this small, domestic and ordinary for their stage production, whatever its interpretive intentions may have been. It is as if Warner and Shaw embraced their new medium – the ultimate purveyor of middle-class truths to the middle class – too completely, cutting the character to fit the box rather than trying to find the synthesis of forms that Juliet Stevenson and David Thacker frequently achieved.
Television is obviously not a very congenial form for the communication of great plays; but it is the only form we have for reaching out to an audience beyond our local and regional limits. That’s all right. The danger is that people may come to believe that televised Ibsen (or Shakespeare or Gypsy) offers a fair substitute for the real theatrical article, when it hasn’t yet proven consistently able to deliver those goods.
