By Charles Spencer Published: 12:13PM GMT 08 March 2010
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Rosamund Pike in Hedda Gabler 
Rosamund Pike in Hedda Gabler 
Rosamund Pike in Hedda Gabler Adrian Noble has cut a rather unequaled figure given he relinquished the helm of the RSC in 2003. Indeed in new years he has been behaving as one of the judges on a Canadian TV bent show, a cut-price Simon Cowell of the northern Rockies. So it is great to find him behind in clever melodramatic form in this gripping, elegantly written furloughed prolongation of Ibsens Hedda Gabler (1890), that has the sights on a West End transfer.
There is something about the unrelenting Norwegian stage player that appeals strongly in these oppressive times, as new revivals of An Enemy of the People and Ghosts have both proved. Ibsens insistence on tough law seems generally fresh among the fudge and weakling evasions of the politicians.
Review: Dublin Theatre Festival Madame de Sade: Hara-kiri, sex and 6 women Rosamund Pike talk Stellas see forward to enlightenment in 2009 Madame de Sade at Wyndhams Theatre, examinationThe arch excellence of this prolongation is Rosamund Pikes opening in the pretension role, once described as the hoop by that each immature singer with her eye on mass contingency jump. Miss Pike performs this attainment with stirring aplomb.
It helps that she is so luminously beautiful, but Pike doesnt shimmer over her characters dignified ugliness. She might opening each man who crosses her trail but her Hedda is additionally intimately frigid, wickedly manipulative and a dignified coward. Pike conveys all this whilst additionally persuading us that Hedda is a honestly comfortless impression value caring about.
If her opening lacks the quicksilver impetuosity that Eve Best brought to the purpose a couple of years ago, it has a dangerous, glamorous attract that is deeply thrilling. And the moments when she brandishes her fathers pistols remind us that early in her career Pike was a glorious Bond girl.
The antagonistic pleasure with that Hedda terrifies and tortures her former schoolmate Mrs Elvsted, melancholy to bake off the hair of a grown lady who has far larger dignified bravery than she has, conjures a disturb of dim eroticism. And the scenes in that she destroys the shining but fatally injured Lovborgs publishing and sends this relapsed and unfortunate alcoholic off to what she imagines will be a pleasing death, have a shudder of genuine immorality about them.
What Hedda wants is comprehensive carry out over others. And piece of her tragedy, Pike strenuously suggests, is that she has lost carry out over her own body, by apropos profound by the father she despises, a believe that creates her punch her own belly with sour offend and despair.
Robert Glenister gives a opening of glorious piquancy as her like a child husband, horribly wakeful of the unintelligent inlet of his own mind nonetheless someway maintaining a singular munificence of spirit. Tim McInnerny could find some-more threat in the revoltingly obsequious Judge Brack, but Colin Tierney harrowingly captures the despondency of Lovborg, whose own injured inlet has jeopardised his lifes work, whilst the recklessness of Zoe Waites as his loyal, amatory messenger is at times roughly as well unpleasant to watch.
What a bloody fool around this is. By the end, the audience, as well as Hedda, feel as if they have been held in the cruellest of traps.
Brighton Theatre Royal (01273 328 488) this week afterwards furloughed to Richmond, Nottingham and Oxford