It shouldn’t have taken the #MeToo protests for film, television and theatre to clock there needed to be better safeguards for its workforce. It was just that too few people felt they could question the usually powerful men who ran the industry.
Sexual abuse may have caught the headlines, but there were many different ways physical and mental safety needed better protection. The scandals prompted better awareness of safety protocols on such props as guns and greater recruitment of intimacy coordinators and therapists.
Nina Segal’s play Shooting Hedda Gabler takes us to a film set where all these safeguards seem to exist and yet the pressure placed on the actor at its centre generates an increasingly disturbing sequence of events that parallel the tragedy of Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler.
The character playing Hedda (Antonia Thomas) became famous as a child star but in recent times has been troubled by a break-up with someone compounded by irritating contact with the media searching for a story. One such encounter resulted in her driving her car into a photographer. In these circumstances, escaping the Hollywood media frenzy by working on a film in Norway seemed like a good idea. She arrives vulnerable and still troubled.
Like all the characters in this play, she will only ever be referred to by a name from Ibsen’s play. Two of the others, Thea (Matilda Bailes) and Jørgen (Joshua James), have already had a bet on whether she will remain with the company. When Jørgen wins and she stays, he gives her the money in case she changes her mind.
As soon as the audience sees the behaviour of the cold, sadistic director Henrik (Christian Rubeck), many will wish that she had left, particularly as his abusive directorial control becomes sexual when he announces he is to play the part of the character Judge Brack so as to make what happens seem more real.
The intimacy coordinator and therapist, Thea (Matilda Bailes), is not entirely sure that what is taking place is okay, but follows the director's orders. A similar sequence takes place with Berta (Anna Andresen), the assistant director responsible for such props as the gun, which Henrik wants Hedda to shoot with more realism.
A further twist to the story takes place when the character to play Ejlert (Avi Nash), the man in love with Hedda, turns out to be the actor now fallen on hard times who was once in love and in a relationship with the woman playing Hedda.
It's as if Hedda has walked into a nightmare, the shifts in lighting by Hansjörg Schmidt and the unsettling sound design of Kieran Lucas emphasise the dreamlike sense of things becoming unreal and out of control. To the side of the stage, Henrik increasingly arranges the Post-it notes in an order that spells the word “Segal”.
The characters are always believable, the script intense and performed by a strong cast. Even if we have never encountered the Ibsen play, we know the direction events depicted are going. Yet at every turn, there are choices. Other characters can see Henrik’s abuse and yet do nothing. I found myself constantly mentally urging the characters to say no.
As the characters wearing green body suits gather to drink a champagne toast to the announcement that Henrik, still in conventional clothes, has won a prestigious film award, a shot rings out from behind a curtain, just as it did in Ibsen’s play. Even as the smug Henrik and the rest move to the curtain, the necessity for more #MeToo protests is obvious.