Ibsen in the Afternoon

Went along to the reading of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler at Actor's Studio yesterday afternoon. Thoroughly enjoyed it, even without costumes or sets, and even though the cast walked it through with scripts in hands.

Ibsen is one of my favourite playwrights. I know A Doll's House pretty well and I've seen Ghosts twice and both times come away from the performance a nervous wreck. But I'd neither read nor seen Hedda Gabbler before and was so pleased to have an opportunity to encounter it in this way.

The cast (Anne James, Chacko Vadaketh, Kee Thuan Chye, Kiew Suet Kim, Sarah Shahrum, Shirley Chang and Zahim Albakri) were excellent. This was only their third rehearsal, for heaven's sake! (Zahim's second.)

It is an excellent play ("a dark psychological drama" the publicity material said) and I liked this modern translation which made it feel contemporary. There are plenty of twists and turns and drama and revelations. Good direction is crucial so that the play stops just short of melodrama, and Soefira Jane managed that. But the greatest delight is the characters. Anne James captured Hedda's cold cruelty and cunning very well, and it isn't at all an easy role. Most of all though, I loved Sarah Shahrum's bimboesque portrayal of Mrs. Elvsted.

There was an audience discussion with the cast and director afterwards. Would we like to see the play staged? We would. What had we liked, not liked about it? I hadn't liked the "Malaysianisation" of Aunt Juliana and the maid and said so. But on the whole there was much much more to praise than criticise. And I really hope there are more play readings to come, especially of Lorca, another of my favourites.

Now much of the drama of the play centred around a lost manuscript of a totally brilliant book, which leads to a suicide and the undoing of Hedda herself.

The moral of the story is clearly: Always Make Back-up Copies of Your Work.

Got a sad e-mail from a fellow writer last night - I'd asked him whether he'd ever sent out a short story that I'd thought was very good. He replied that his hard disk had crashed and he had lost everything he'd written since he was 9! My goodness. I've had hard disks crash on me too and save not only on floppy disk (do they still call 'em that? The technology keeps moving on while I'm stuck in a stoneage rut!) but also online - that's what I use my Google account for, with all its megamightymultigigabites of space.