Henrik & Hedda

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was a Norwegian playwright, often hailed as a the "father" of modern drama. What make his plays feel so modern is that they revolved around lives of ordinary middle-class people like bankers, lawyers, academics, governesses, housewives, etc. They were also written in conversational, everyday prose and dealt with contemporary social and political issues. Plays like A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1880), Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892) were intentionally meant to shock and rattle - to expose the façade of bourgeois middle-class life. Though he is primarily celebrated for his theatrical realism, his work became more and more symbolic and lyrical towards the end of his career.

Interestingly, though Ibsen's plays are often set in Norway, he himself left Norway in 1864, and lived primarily in Italy and Germany. So his view of Christiania (Oslo) as a conservative society in churn, while accurate, was made from a distance. He himself had no desire to return to Norway until right before his death.

Hedda Gabler was written at the height of his celebrity as a playwright. This play was global from the beginning, as this brief production history below indicates. Though early reviews of the play were mostly quite negative, with audiences feeling quite put off at the protagonist being such a strange, irrational, seemingly immoral woman. But the juicy behind-the scenes is that many aspects of Hedda's character were inspired by real life stories and anecdotes. Read more about that here.

Early Production History of Hedda Gabler

The play was published on December 16, 1890 in Copenhagen. This was the first of Ibsen’s plays to be translated from proofs and published in England and America almost simultaneously.

January 31, 1891: Premiered at the Residenz Theater, Munich
February 10, 1891: Lessing Theater, Berlin
February 26, 1891: Christiania Theatre, Oslo
April 20, 1891: Vaudeville Theatre, London
March 30, 1898: Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York City