Hedda - Softcover

Ibsen, Henrik

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184842020X ISBN 13: 9781848420205

Publisher: Nick Hern Books, 2009

Synopsis

In Lucy Kirkwood's version of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen's nineteenth-century heroine is relocated to present-day London, to startling effect.

Hedda, still mourning for the father she adored, returns from honeymoon with a husband she doesn't love, to a flat and a pregnancy she doesn't want. Trapped by her past and terrified of her future, bored by her life but too cowardly to walk away from it, she finds herself caught between three men. And in the end, something has to give

About this title

About the Author:

Lucy Kirkwood is a British playwright and screenwriter whose plays include: Mosquitoes(National Theatre, 2017); The Children (Royal Court Theatre, 2016); Chimerica (Almeida Theatre & West End, 2013; winner of the 2014 Olivier Award for Best New Play, the 2013 Evening Standard Best Play Award, the 2014 Critics’ Circle Best New Play Award, and the Susan Smith Blackburn Award); NSFW (Royal Court, 2012); small hours (co-written with Ed Hime; Hampstead Theatre, 2011); Beauty and the Beast (with Katie Mitchell; National Theatre, 2010); Bloody Wimmin, as part of Women, Power and Politics (Tricycle Theatre, 2010); it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now (Clean Break & Arcola Theatre, 2009; winner of the 2012 John Whiting Award); Hedda (Gate Theatre, London, 2008); and Tinderbox (Bush Theatre, 2008).

She won the inaugural Berlin Lee UK Playwrights Award in 2013.

Born in Norway in 1828, Ibsen began his writing career with romantic history plays influenced by Shakespeare and Schiller. In 1851 he was appointed writer-in-residence at the newly established Norwegian Theatre in Bergen with a contract to write a play a year for five years, following which he was made Artistic Director of the Norwegian Theatre in what is now Oslo. In the 1860s he moved abroad to concentrate wholly on writing. He began with two mighty verse dramas, Brand and Peer Gynt, and in the 1870s and 1880s wrote the sequence of realistic ‘problem’ plays for which he is best known, among them A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm. His last four plays, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken, dating from his return to Norway in the 1890s, are increasingly overlaid with symbolism. Illness forced him to retire in 1900, and he died in 1906 after a series of crippling strokes.

Review:

"A Hedda for our times." —Guardian

(2019-05-24)

"Ibsen's 19th-century masterpiece relocated thrillingly to London 2008... Kirkwood makes us believe absolutely in this modern-day world of mountainous mortgages and bitchy academia." —Evening Standard

(2019-05-24)

About this edition

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 184842020X
• ISBN 13: 9781848420205
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128