On demand: "Hedda Gabler"

Compared to Nia DaCosta's recent, ultra-modern rethink Hedda, Hedda Gabler - a live television filming of 1962, revived on BBC Four last weekend as part of the broadcaster's winter Ibsen season - is likely to strike contemporary viewers as very much of the old school. It benefits from several masterstrokes at the casting stage, revealed once we set foot inside the palatial marital home newly occupied by mollified historian Michael Redgrave (cosy, beardy, almost fatally English) and Ingrid Bergman (worldly, knowing, icy-to-severe). This union is plainly doomed from the off, even before ghosts of Hedda's past - notably her former (and apparently unforgettable) lover Ejlert Løvborg (Trevor Howard) - drift into shot. Bergman and Howard, the disillusioned gal from Casablanca and a rougher-edged variant of the doctor from Brief Encounter: this, surely, is a more plausible match. There follows just over an hour of social calls - first a flirty Ralph Richardson as the Judge, then Howard, then the undertakers and the man with the broom - in which the usual niceties and rules of decorum are scrubbed away. The staff we see in the opening scene knock off early, leaving these posh nobs to thrash and shoot it out between them. In a way Ibsen would surely have approved, soon it's every man and woman for themselves. 

The production, by contrast, is more harmonious, uniting those mid-century telly principles of good writing, good playing and good direction. Phil Reisman's abridged text gets in the guts of this play and slowly winds its intestines around the characters' necks, while Alex Segal's direction is notable for its skilful darkening of tone: this is cosy Sunday night viewing, up until the point it very definitely isn't. Redgrave and Howard, by this moment reliable old hands, etch contrasting ideas of masculinity, one weak and dithering, the other brutally cruel, although both finally come to bow before their female co-star. Though she can't entirely sell us on the madness typically drawn out over a long night in the theatre (all the business about "vine leaves in his hair" sounds like either an especially weird fetish or mere mistranslation), a flighty and restless Bergman appears to foresee a world where Hedda might be reclaimed and redeemed as the stage's first polysexual, penned in at every turn by dullards and tchotchkes. The judge's description of this affair as "a triangular friendship" now seems a winking sign of how the television of the early 1960s was just beginning to loosen up, but everything else here is recognisably - and positively - Reithian: a relic of the days when broadcast TV still seemed to set some stock in culture, and determined to make even those plays with forbidding reputations accessible to all.

Hedda Gabler is now streaming via the BBC iPlayer.