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In new film Hedda, the action is re-envisioned in 1950s England (Credit: Prime Video)

"Hedda is a master of pretending and affect," Thompson says. "One of the things that I really appreciate about English culture – and delight in – is its manners. The 1950s in particular was a time when people were going to elocution classes, [learning] how to [fold] the napkin just so and what to do with your gloves. There was an echelon of society that felt very mannered. 

"Hedda is a woman who wants access to society, wealth and status. In this case, that has to do with proximity to those things," Thompson adds. Her role here is re-envisioned as the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of the deceased General Gabler – resulting in a slippery exploration of desire, femininity and fate, involving various strata of power such as gender, race and class.

In another change, unlike the original play, the film unravels over the course of one night, as Hedda hosts a decadent and dastardly soirée. "She's someone who really wants everyone's animals to come out," DaCosta tells the BBC. "And she's someone who is, without maybe really knowing it, a wonderer, a questioner. She questions everything. The way she does that is quite violent and destructive."

In the 13 years since Ibsen's play first premiered at the Königliches Residenz-Theater in Munich, the landscape for women’s rights had changed dramatically. The Norwegian playwright penned his claustrophobic psychodrama before the women's suffrage movements of the 19th and 20th Century had gained momentum, but his story seemed to predict the social upheaval they would soon precipitate. At the play's epicentre is a woman fed up with the strictures of a patriarchal society – a situation which still rings true for many in the modern day. The play's continual reinvention is testament to its contemporary resonance.

Why the character inspires debate

But even as societal norms have shifted, and sympathy for women in Hedda's knotty predicament might have grown, the character continues to divide opinion. We first meet Hedda upon her return from her honeymoon with new husband George Tesman, an academic with little interest in anything beyond his books. Simultaneously, her old beau Løvborg – a renowned writer and Tesman's rival for a university position he is desperate for in order to repay his debts – and his new companion Thea Elvsted (a schoolmate of Hedda's) arrive back in town. Hedda spies an opportunity to exercise her "power to mould a human destiny", as she says, by burning her former lover's prized manuscript – but her plan backfires, and the play ends with her suicide. 

Whether Hedda is lashing out at an unfair system, acting out of pure spite, pursuing greater meaning by testing the limits of fate, beauty and tragedy, or wreaking havoc in the lives of others for sheer entertainment remains unclear. Her wily schemes and shadowy motives have left many audiences and critics over the decades unable to decide whether she is a monster, or a victim.

Cate Blanchett is among the many famous actresses who have taken on the role (Credit: Getty Images)

Countless big-name actors have strived to inhabit this inscrutable character onstage, from Maggie Smith and Fiona Shaw, to Ruth Wilson, Annette Bening, Isabelle Huppert, Rosamund Pike and Cate Blanchett. In 2009, the latest in a string of disappointing New York productions led the Observer's theatre critic John Heilpern to declare: "Hedda Gabler is apparently the only play that Henrik Ibsen ever wrote."

So why has the play, and its complicated protagonist, proved so compelling? It is significant that Gabler, a name that has exploded in popular culture throughout the last century, is Hedda's maiden name, rather than her married name Tesman. Corresponding with the Swedish poet Count Carl Soilsky, Ibsen wrote: "My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda, as a personality, is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than as her husband's wife" – the implication being, it would seem, that Hedda cannot be cowed by the institution of marriage.

Upon its premiere, Hedda Gabler sent shockwaves through genteel European society, which did not know what to make of its dislikeable heroine and marriage-critical themes. "Male critics would fall back on animalistic imagery," says Kirsten Shepherd, professor of English and theatre studies at the University of Oxford and author of several books and chapters on Ibsen. "These male critics didn't know what to make of an unwomanly, unfeminine woman. It's not possible to be outside the dominant mode of femininity at that time without being accused of not being a human" – that mode being passive, restrained and certainly not deliberately cruel.

The woman who may have inspired her 

In its depiction of a woman determined to assert her independence, Hedda Gabler may now seem light-years ahead of its time, but its themes had been brewing in Ibsen's work for more than a decade. "It follows a succession of [his] plays that increasingly deal with women's roles in society," explains Shepherd. "You could say he starts [on that theme] with A Doll's House." 

That play, which premiered in Denmark in 1879, is also about a woman confined in a suffocating marriage and railing against restrictive gender roles. And its events were inspired by the experiences of Ibsen's contemporary Laura Kieler, a lesser-known Norwegian-Danish novelist who turned to Ibsen for help during her own marital crisis. She hoped that Ibsen would recommend her work to his publisher so that she could raise crucial funds to repay her family's debts. Instead, he refused, she obtained the money fraudulently, and was then divorced and committed to an asylum by her husband upon his discovery of her actions.

A young Benedict Cumberbatch playing Hedda's husband Tesman, opposite Eve Best, in 2006 (Credit: Alamy)

It's been suggested by some that A Doll's House was driven by remorse and was a kind of apology through art. In 1878, Ibsen claimed to write with a fresh awareness that "a woman cannot be herself in modern society. It is an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint." Ibsen's ending to the play, which grants the heroine Nora the freedom Kieler was denied, sees her walk out of her unhappy marriage. A Doll's House caused a storm of controversy.

"Kieler thinks about [Ibsen's actions] for about 10 years, and then she writes a play called Men of Honour, very sarcastically named, and gets it published and produced in Copenhagen," says Shepherd. "[Ibsen]'s following Kieler's story. She actually sent him a copy of her play. This is all happening around the time of Hedda Gabler, that her play is coming out, and he's really sharply aware of the limitations for talented women in society. And she was an extremely talented writer."  

What's really going on with the character

However unlike Nora or Ellida – the protagonist of Ibsen's 1888 play The Lady from the Sea, which probed nascent ideas about mental health – Hedda is decidedly "destructive, cruel and merciless," says Shepherd. "He's working hard to make us not be attracted to this character. So you have to think, 'why is that? Why would he want to create a leading female character that isn't actually an appealing figure? Where are her redeeming qualities?'"

Another aspect that was – and continues to be – tough to swallow for audiences was Hedda's aversion to motherhood. Ongoing allusions by Ibsen to the notion that she is pregnant, and therefore also kills her unborn child, seem to put her character in dialogue with myths about murderous mothers such as Medea or Lamia. The explicit mentions of pregnancy, and moreover brazen comments from Hedda declaring that she doesn’t want to be a mother, "caused issues at the time, because you couldn't allude to pregnancy in a frank way like that," says Shepherd.

When Hedda landed on the London stage, also in 1891, that first UK production played a large part in cementing the play's standing in wider Europe. Though Ibsen’s work was "taboo", says Shepherd, the actor Elizabeth Robins set about putting on an opulent staging at the Independent Theatre – a small-scale venue where more avant-garde works were performed to avoid "censorship" elsewhere in the major theatres. "[Her production] brought a kind of panache to Ibsen that people hadn't been expecting, and they couldn't just sweep him aside as some old-fashioned, dowdy, or stodgy playwright. It was stylish and horrifying, all at the same time," says Shepherd.

The fate of Norwegian-Danish novelist Laura Kieler made Ibsen aware of how "a woman cannot be herself in modern society" (Credit: Alamy)

This sense of splendour, feverishness and voluptuousness that has perhaps since been lost in recent revivals is something DaCosta's version attempts to channel. "The particular [productions] I had seen were very traditional, very rigid, and didn't really dig into the humour that I saw in the piece, the thriller aspects of it and the depth of the psychology," explains the director. "[Hedda] finds it impossible [to deal with] what she sees in other people, which is everyone lying and pretending, even though she's the best pretender of them all. I think she sees that as a survival technique. But there are so many other dynamic things about her that drew me to her, like her many masks, [...] her vulnerability, her pain, her sadness, her feelings of being trapped."

Hedda's set clamours with mirrors, serving as a reminder that the characters refract each others' qualities. Over the course of this frenzied night of revelry, the three women – Hedda, Eileen and Thea – jostle against each other and make their own, different bids for power. "You have these three women who are all trying to figure out what freedom is, asking the same questions that Hedda is asking in the play," says DaCosta.