These are questions you have to ask yourself as a director – you’ll be confronted with them anyway while working with the actors. But what keeps astonishing me is how exciting this play is. Ibsen must have had a lot of fun writing it. For me, that was the first reason to want to direct it: it sucks you along from the beginning to the fatal ending. Once I had made that decision, however, the idea of adapting it soon became imperative. Not in order to cut the play to pieces or to ridicule the author – but for instance, the role of the maid: I didn’t think it added anything so I scrapped it. (Playing that role is also a thankless job.) As a result, the entrances and exits of the characters are now much closer together, which has an accelerating effect.

A bigger intervention was the elimination of the role of Aunt Julia, Tesman’s aunt, who already pays a visit to the young couple on the first morning after their honeymoon, even before they are awake. I scrapped the character, but did keep part of the text and gave it to Judge Brack. So, it is not the sanctimonious Aunt Julia who asks Tesman at the beginning of the play if Hedda is already pregnant, but Hedda’s own lover, who, because he has acted as a broker during the purchase of the house, ‘still has a key also’. More than in the original, Brack in this adaptation is a perfidious manipulator.

For the rest, I ‘streamlined’ the script; I eliminated replies which I felt were superfluous and tried to pare down the rhetoric of 19th-century bourgeois ceremonies to shorter, sharp sentences. It makes the whole – again – faster.

None of this changes the strength of the play. Nor does it change the enigmatic character of much of what is said here. It is amazing how so many replies remain open to varying interpretations – which immediately is one answer to the question of why this play holds its own so well.

In order to come up with a possible interpretation of the roles, anyone working on Hedda Gabler can do nothing but test his or her own feelings and views against what there is on paper. That’s how the play is written: compelling, and at the same time very open, very inviting. You have to invest a lot of yourself in order to arrive at a possible understanding, and that process is intense, instructive and inspiring. The most remarkable thing – for us, at least – is that Hedda Gabler turns out to be a tragedy no longer. It’s possible that the accelerating interventions have something to do with this, but I believe that they above all reinforce what is hidden in the dark undercurrents of the play. With several hilarious male roles, Hedda Gabler is almost a comedy today, a bitter comedy with a deadly ending.

Bart Meuleman, January 2016

Afterword to the script of Hedda Gabler published by Bebuquin / Toneelhuis