Hedda Gabler

Hedda Gabler is a femme fatale who can prove deadly to the play in which she finds herself. There is always a balance to be struck in Ibsen between tragedy and farce. In Adrian Noble's flamboyant but misconceived production, farce has the upper hand. In a scarlet parlour (designed by Anthony Ward), Rosamund Pike's Hedda looks like Grace Kelly and behaves like an aggressive swan. She is radiant, violent - borderline psychotic. It is an astonishing performance but played for laughs (which she gets). At one point, she screws up a page from her ex-lover Løvborg's masterpiece and pops it into her mouth - she eats his words. She creates an exaggerated distance between herself and others (though Tim McInnerny's Judge Brack survives the treatment - a penguin to Hedda's swan - and Zoe Waites's Mrs Elvsted convinces). Yet this Hedda eventually diminishes tragedy. And when, in an almost careless, trigger-unhappy moment, she shoots herself, you feel - as she falls - an indifference to match her own.