Hedda Gabler

Hedda Gabler is a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, written in Danish, the literary language Ibsen used for his published work, and first performed on 31 January 1891 at the Residenztheater in Munich, Germany, with Ibsen himself present in the audience though remaining backstage. The play centers on Hedda Tesman, born Hedda Gabler, a newly married general's daughter trapped in a marriage and a domestic existence she finds stiflingly devoid of excitement, whose destructive manipulation of the people around her, including her husband's academic rival, drives the drama to its tragic conclusion. Ibsen's choice to title the play using his protagonist's maiden name rather than her married name has been read as a deliberate signal that Hedda remains, in her own mind, her father's daughter rather than her husband's wife. Though its first reviews were largely unfavorable, Hedda Gabler has since come to be regarded as a masterpiece of dramatic realism and one of the central plays of nineteenth-century world theatre, with its title character frequently described as a female counterpart to Hamlet.