Guns, roses, tilled soil and feathers. These are just some of the items to be found scattered throughout Olwagen’s production of Hedda Gabler, soon to be staged at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town.
This award-winning reworking of Henrik Ibsen’s play about one of the theatre’s most enduring femme fatales is brought into the 21st century with the distinctively fiery title character played by Rolanda Marais. Hedda Gabler will be performed in Afrikaans from 1 to 10 May, and from 12 to 24 May the same ensemble will present the English debut.
Following a sold-out debut at the 2024 Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees, Hedda Gabler was a big winner at this year’s kykNET Fiëstas with four awards: best actress for Marais’s brilliant performance, best achievement in design, best ensemble and best festival production. The play was awarded the first Martie Retief Meiring Award at the Woordtrofees last year for new work that brought challenge and excitement to the stage and got audiences talking.
Hedda is recently returned from her honeymoon with Jurg (Albert Pretorius), but all is not well in the household. Despite Jurg’s success, he already bores her, and he still can’t believe that the beautiful Hedda chose him. When her old flame, Lovborg (Ludwig Binge) suddenly shows up, she aims a wrecking ball at her life. Why? Because she can.
Marina Griebenouw, in her review for INK, remarked that Ibsen’s most complex female character “beguiles and scorches as spectacularly and fleetingly as a comet through the sky everyone who crosses her path or stands in her way. Just so in Christiaan Olwagen’s production”, in which Hedda gives a fat middle finger to being nice. She is awful, and she knows it.
Elzanne Coetzee gives the production full marks on Klyntji and believes that “Olwagen’s interpretation and handling of this text breathes new life into the wild woman trope”.
Laetitia Pople, Netwerk24’s national arts editor, describes the set as an “architectural marvel”. And “as I walk out of the theatre I think that there is something incredibly satisfying about a neat set that is completely destroyed by an explosive production”, writes Coetzee.
Tickets are available on Webtickets.
Duration: 120 minutes
Age restriction: No u.16
A Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees production supported by NATi and the Baxter Theatre
