Of all the plays Ibsen wrote, Hedda Gabler probably contains the most humour. You can’t call it a comedy, but the way some of the men in this play revolve around a spoilt, bored and above all deeply unhappy woman does make for a few hilarious moments. 

Henrik Ibsen took potshots at the suffocating bourgeois milieu at the end of the nineteenth century in, for example, Nora, A Dolls’ House and Ghosts and he had some of his characters extricate themselves from it (Nora), while it proved the downfall of others (Oswald Alving, and so also Hedda Gabler).

The world has changed of course. The long century of emancipation as Ibsen predicted it in his plays, is behind us, and when we look back we see much bitterness and disillusionment. Didn’t the freedom we sought bring the happiness we had so longed for? Perhaps it didn’t even exist. That at any rate is what the sombre image of the future is trying to tell us now: that we would do better to go back to what we know so well, rather than risk a leap into the unknown.

In Bart Meuleman’s adaptation, Hedda Gabler is also about the consequences of social restoration today. How characters shut themselves up in a small, oppressive world in times which require a new certainty. This changes none of the structure of the original play: Hedda Gabler is still a thoroughly engrossing work.