STURM UND DRANG.(Hedda Gabler)(Theater review)

Cate Blanchett is a very beautiful woman. With her erect posture, almond-shaped eyes, and slim-hipped frame, the thirty-six-year-old Australian-born actress resembles a Nordic Galatea, or the regal figurehead at the prow of a ship. But, instead of being awash in waves and sun, Blanchett--in her film roles, at least--is awash in delicacies of emotion: repressed rage, embarrassment, fear. Her alabaster skin flushes with the effort to contain the vulgarity of feeling that sometimes overwhelms her characters. For her 2004 Oscar-winning performance as Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator," Blanchett was given the chance to indulge what many of her previous directors had ignored: her grand physicality. Dressed in slacks and fur coats, she strode across Hollywood's manicured lawns like a nervous but self-possessed feline, sniffing the air for luxury. She didn't so much imitate Hepburn as riff on the Hepburn persona, with its blithe self-regard, its steely ambition offset by self-mocking laughter, its Puritan distrust of sentimentality.

Perhaps it's not so strange, then, that, two years after the film premiered, Blanchett is still playing Hepburn--though now she's playing Hepburn playing Hedda Gabler, in a Sydney Theatre Company production (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). In Andrew Upton's streamlined adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's 1890 text, we find ourselves less in the playwright's horrifying world of domestic terror, manipulation, and shame than in another Hepburn vehicle: Philip Barry's 1939 drawing-room comedy, "The Philadelphia Story." Like that musty romp--it's Coward lite--Upton's version of "Hedda Gabler," directed here by Robyn Nevin, is long on action and laughs, with some nice costume changes, and an alluring, fashion-conscious woman at its center.

The scene: Jorgen Tesman's drawing room. Ibsen describes it as "well furnished, in good taste, and decorated in dark colours." Tesman (the perfectly cast Anthony Weigh) is a youngish scholar who is researching a book about the history of civilization. But, in a sense, he has a lot to learn about being civilized. After all, he's just returned from a six-month honeymoon with his new wife, Hedda, whose foul resentment, disregard for others, and contempt for intelligence, even her own, mark her as something of a savage. When Hedda appears onstage for the first time, interrupting her husband's happy reunion with his aunt, Juliane (Julie Hamilton), she finds him exclaiming over an old pair of slippers that Juliane has saved for him. In the classic English translation of the play, by Una Ellis-Fermor, Hedda responds with dry wit: "Oh yes. I remember you often spoke about them while we were away." In Upton's text, her opening gambit is reduced to blatant disdain. Tesman asks her to look at his aunt's gift, and she says abruptly, "I'd rather not." Thus, from the opening scene, Upton dispenses with the various nuances of Hedda's character--part of her enduring greatness is that we will never entirely understand her--and leaves us in the company of a woman whose cutting speech is as small-minded as the circumstances in which she finds herself.

In one of the more exceptional readings of the play, Elizabeth Hardwick describes Hedda as a creature of style, meaning that her distinction lies in her obsessive regard for the way things look. Hedda does not notice her husband's inner qualities; all she can see is his slippers. Nor can this general's daughter accept the gemutlich atmosphere that Tesman has cultivated--among other things, she complains about the proliferation of flowers in Tesman's drawing room. (This line, too, is excised from Upton's adaptation.) Because Hedda has not decorated Tesman's house herself, it becomes for her a provincial nightmare. And because Tesman is too blind to know what he has got into by marrying Hedda, she will force him to see it, by removing the delicate antimacassars from his sofas and chairs. This Blanchett does with strident efficiency. Her dramatic physical gestures are intended to cover up the holes in Upton's adaptation, but they don't: they only render her slightly ridiculous, like a petulant ...