In Conversation With Hedda And Nora

When Simon Stone somewhat unexpectedly left his role as Resident Director at Belvoir last year, his shoes were filled twice over – Artistic Director of Fraught Outfit and Director-in-Residence at Malthouse in 2012, Adena Jacobs, and Artistic Director of The Hayloft Project, Anne-Louise Sarks joined the fray.

Now both are preparing Ibsen pieces for their respective debuts as Directors in Residence at Belvoir – first cab off the ranks is Jacobs, who will direct her own adaptation of the tragic Hedda Gabler, before Sarks moves into the Upstairs Theatre with Nora, a new work written with Kit Brookman after Ibsen's A Doll's House, which speculates what Nora Helmer's life would have been like had she walked out the door at the end of the play and into 2014.

“We weren't sure what it would mean to do two Ibsens, particularly Hedda and Nora, which are pair pieces – they relate to each other quite strongly,” Jacobs admits. “And then we became really excited by the idea of presenting them back to back and having them sit in conversation with each other.”

After watching Sisters Grimm's The Sovereign Wife at last year's MTC Neon Festival, Jacobs had a sense of the confluence between the actions and play of Ash Flanders performing as Hedda Gabler and Hedda Gabler performing as Hedda Gabler – this is not the story of a woman, but of identity in conflict with the world within which it exists.

“He was extraordinary, and after the show my partner and I were chatting and we just went: he should play a tragic heroine!” Jacobs recalls with a sense of the original epiphany. “That was the strength of that performance, and from there the notion of Hedda started to form. There was something about the cocktail of Ash, the kind of performer that he is, and the character of Hedda Gabler and all of the qualities that she embodies that I could start to look at the play anew through the perspective of Ash's involvement.

“Hedda's crisis is about her internal world, her wild urges and her desires not fitting with the mask that she's adopted, the role that she has to play, the environment that she's in, and so simply by Ash pursuing the role of Hedda Gabler fully and truthfully, because he is a male performer who can identify so strongly with the feminine in performance truthfully, without it being mimicry, something about that sheds light on Hedda as a figure, and something about Ash in that role sheds light on the performativity of living, which I'm always interested in.”

Both Jacobs and Sarks will bring Ibsen to a contemporary setting at Belvoir, and through the conversation already emerging between the two, the playwright's predilection for prediction is startling.

“Those turn-of-the-century plays were written in relation to industrialisation and the fear that they'd be overtaken, and now I think there's a sense of a new non-human element encroaching upon us, and there's a reason why we're going back to these plays now.”