When Nia DaCosta took on playwright Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, she didn’t come to adapt the play. She came to reinvent it.
The result is an impressive work of technical achievement. Starring Tessa Thompson and Nina Hoss as feuding women of intimidating genius, stymied and pitted against one another by a patriarchal society, Hedda explores Ibsen's themes of duplicity.
Namely, is the story’s focus — kept woman Hedda Gabler, trapped in an aristocratic marriage by her own mercurial impulses and outside social pressures — a villain, or victim for finding a sense of personal power in manipulating those around her? Hedda, available to stream on Prime now, asks the same question. But while keeping the basics, DaCosta’s version does away with pretty much everything else.
“It’s what keeps classical works alive. That you have to adapt it, not just for the time, but for the person that you are,” DaCosta told IndieWire about her version, which recasts Hedda as a queer Black woman in an era with little consideration for either identity.
“Not so much trying to make a beat-for-beat, faithful adaptation … I wanted to do something that was really about my reaction to it, and set it more inside of my creative space.”
In that spirit, and for your viewing pleasure, we’ve put together a masterlist of other adaptat
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