“Hedda Gabler”, the fascinating play of the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, is on at the Stegi Theatre of the Onassis Cultural Centre. The award winner stage director Michalis Konstantatos, Vassilis Panagiotakopoulos, who organized the play production, and the rest of the members of the theatrical team Blindspot place the action of Ibsen’s play in a glass bowl full of sand, not in the “spacious and pleasant sitting room” of the conventional stage directions. “I created a desert inside a glass bowl, because this scenic environment in a way reflects the inner life landscape of Hedda herself”, the stage director explains. “Everything inside her is dry, still and static, but we don’t know what is hidden under this sand… This is Hedda: a bourgeois woman who lost her economic background and automatically changed social class. A person trapped in the defence that she has erected in her effort to survive against the machinery of the social environment. Aren’t we all like that? We make countless ‘glass bowls’ to protect ourselves from a threatening social system and they eventually become our prison. Some people live in these prisons for ever, while some others manage to escape”.
The play was sponsored by PROLAT, who also provided the sand that was a key material on stage. A happy new year to everyone and may we all find the strength to escape our own glass prisons…
