Review: Hedda, Riverside Studios

Written for Time Out

Ibsen might be in vogue all of a sudden - this month the Sheffield Crucible re-opens with one of his and another begins a West End run - but, chances are, you won't see much like this.

The recently formed Ibsen Stage Company steer ardently against naturalism, instead entrapping Ibsen's newlyweds in an abstract void. Their dream home is replaced by a crater formed from the pages of an exploded manuscript. Director Terje Tveit sets his cast in orbit and foregrounds the inevitability of events, treating the play as little more than a closed system tending towards entropy.

The unashamed tone of inquiry claims narrative satisfaction as a victim and, although it is elegantly designed and smartly lit, the result is too coldly dispassionate to excite, but fails to compensate with real insight or specificity. Instead, Tveit offers determinism as a solution, spreading responsibility equally and reducing Sarah Head's Hedda, whose eyes flick back and forth in constant calculation, to little more than a data-processing automaton