HEDDA

Classics are matrices of our identities that we revise and revisit to illuminate the present. This is what Aurore Fattier and her writing partners achieve by superimposing another fable onto its original model: Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.

A few days before the premiere of Hedda Gabler, director Laure Stijn is plagued by doubt, as an event challenges her approach to the play. She feels invaded by the memory of her sister's mysterious disappearance fifteen years earlier. This ghostly presence haunts her work. By taking Hedda, the first title of the 1890 play, Aurore Fattier immediately asserts a concern for fidelity to Ibsen, while at the same time affirming her emancipation. In this mirrored structure, Ibsen's characters serve as a vanishing line and underlying model for the contemporary rewriting of the play. Laure and Hedda engage in a dialogue separated by more than one hundred and thirty years. A fruitful dialogue, given that Ibsen's imposing portrait of a woman seems to have been perpetuated. A live filming device, like an eye grazing the actors and actresses, enables us to keep this theatrical model at a distance or bring it closer to our contemporary questioning, and capture its inexpressible secret.