Ingrid Lorentzen about Hedda Gabler

There is something quite singular about returning to Hedda Gabler. Not only because she is one of Ibsen’s most enigmatic figures, but because she reflects something in us that can be difficult to speak aloud. The restlessness we carry, the strength we possess, and the disappointment we conceal. 

Ibsen wrote drama for the stage – living, physical storytelling meant to unfold before an audience. When Marit Moum Aune created this version in 2017, it felt like a small revolution for us: allowing the body to tell Hedda’s story. Even without words, when we let dance carry Hedda’s inner conflict, we return to something fundamentally Ibsenian: the action, the subtext, the unspoken tensions between people in a room. 

Hedda Gabler became a work that pointed towards everything dance can do when it meets drama on its own terms. And when the role found its form in Grete Sofie Borud Nybakken, it became something deeply personal – for her, for us, and for the entire ensemble. Her return to Hedda now, nine years later and for the third time, lends the work a new gravity and a new vulnerability. She dances with experience, with memory, and with time. 

In this revival, Grete – together with Kristian Alm – steps back onstage from the original cast. Around them, new dancers from the Norwegian National Ballet enter the roles – some for the very first time – opening the space for new interpretations. Hedda’s world is also shaped by the artists around the dancers: by Nils Petter Molvær’s music, Even Børsum’s set design, Ingrid Nylander’s costumes, and Kristin Bredal’s lighting. 

Hedda remains a modern figure: caught between expectation and autonomy, with a potential constrained by external demands, inner vulnerability, and a life path she has not chosen herself. It is dangerous to carry a potential left unrealised: for her, it ends fatally. In this, Ibsen points to – and warns of – something deeply human, something that echoes repeatedly throughout history. 

Ibsen’s most dangerous woman has been interpreted countless times – in text, on stage, and on film. And behind our Hedda stands an artist who has mastered an exceptionally wide range of forms. Over the years, Marit Moum Aune has brought classics and newly written works to the theatre, through television drama, opera, and dance – and with her interpretations of Ibsen she has taken the Norwegian National Ballet out into the world: to Berlin, Shanghai, Paris, Moscow, Vienna and Hong Kong. 

In the meeting between Norwegian narratives and international stages, moments have arisen that have left lasting marks: as in Hong Kong in the autumn of 2019, where a conversation with the audience about Ibsen and the search for freedom suddenly mirrored the struggle for freedom taking place just outside the theatre doors. Or at the Bolshoi Theatre in 2017, where several young audience members said they had never before seen a woman lead a production – and where themes of isolation, power, and powerlessness gained new and heightened resonance in the years that followed. Soon he will be 200 years old, the world dramatist Henrik Ibsen – and still new ways of reading him, challenging him, and being challenged by him continue to emerge. 

Each of Ibsen’s plays must be understood in its own time. As we now approach the Ibsen Year in 2028, an opportunity opens that feels particularly important: to use the performing arts to illuminate, challenge, and initiate conversations that otherwise might never take place. Through art, we can direct our gaze inward – towards how we see ourselves as a society and a nation – and outward, to how Ibsen’s voice continues to reverberate in the world 200 years after his birth. The theatre can create a space for legitimate and necessary discourse, even where such discourse can be difficult to carry out openly. 

Action and reaction: Marit Moum Aune uses this principle actively in her work with the dancers. It mirrors the encounter between stage and audience – the reciprocal movement that makes theatre come alive. Ibsen works in the same way: his characters are not confined by the story but continue to become, each time we meet them anew. 

To you, dear audience: welcome in. 

And to the artists waiting in the wings: stage is clear.