Friel does more than simply translate Ibsen's classic play, he makes it better

CULTURE SHOCKIN HENRIK IBSEN'S Hedda Gabler, there is an off-stage wild woman called Mademoiselle Diana, referred to as "a singer . . . among other things".

She copperfastens the doom of one of the main characters - the unstable young genius Ejlert Lovborg. In Brian Friel's new version of the play, she is called, not Mademoiselle Diana, but Mademoiselle Circe - a little nod to the Circe episode of Ulysses, written by Ibsen's Irish devotee James Joyce. But she is also given a real name. Another of the main characters, Judge Brack, reveals that she had been up before him in court and that "in those days her more decorous name was Mary Bridget O'Donnell". It is an odd name for a femme fatale in 19th century Norway, though not of course for a character in Friel's own work, which teems with O'Donnells.

From small details like this, it would seem safe to assume that Friel's version of Hedda is essentially an attempt to Hibernicise Ibsen. This would make it part of a movement that stretches back to Thomas Kilroy's ground-breaking version of Chekhov's The Seagull for the Royal Court in London in 1981. Kilroy saw the parallels between the late 19th century Russian landowners of Chekhov's plays - threatened by decline and hearing the distant rumble of approaching revolution - and the Anglo-Irish ascendancy class of the same period. That notion has been more implicit than explicit in Friel's own versions of Chekhov (Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya) and Turgenev (A Month in the Country and Fathers and Sons).

But Friel's Hedda is something very different. It is not an Irish Hedda - in spite of the obligatory O'Donnell (whose presence is really an elegant in-joke) there are no real resonances with our 19th century history. Nor is it an updated version like the recent ones by Thomas Ostermeier, set in contemporary Germany, or Lucy Kirkwood's, set in a dilapidated flat in today's Notting Hill. On the surface it may look rather conventional - a Hedda set in the usual 1890s drawing room with Norwegian names and references to Trondheim and fjords and all the plot and characters preserved. But it is in fact much bolder than any hip reworking of a classic. It is in fact nothing less than a complete rethinking of the text.

Across the gulf of the 20th century one great playwright is talking to another and imagining, with breathtaking chutzpah, what he would have done if he were Ibsen. In other hands, it would be an act of appalling cheek. In Friel's it is an act both of self-confidence and of devotion. He is good enough to make significant additions to Ibsen's text and humble enough to put his own creative powers at the service of the Norwegian master. Instead of making Hedda Gabler "relevant" by giving it a contemporary gloss, he simply makes it better. Or to be more precise, he makes it better in English. Since we cannot really experience Hedda as Ibsen wrote it, he allows us to experience it as if it was written by a great English-language playwright.

The boldness is there from the very start. Friel's version has a new first line. The kindly spinster aunt, Juliana, enters the drawing room with the servant Bertha. In the received text, she says to the servant simply: "Why, I don't believe they're up yet." In Friel's version, Juliana comes into the room alone for a moment. She mutters softly to herself: "I was afraid of that." It is a simple and subtle harbinger of unease, a sign that all is not right. In the following lines, Friel interpolates an immediate discussion of the central character we have not yet met - Hedda herself. As in the standard version, Bertha remarks that she insisted on unpacking all her trunks after she arrived home the previous night. It is a gentle introduction to the notion of a headstrong character. Friel, though, has Juliana defend her: "She's a very efficient young woman." The servant replies: "Why did she call me Berna then?" And this business of Hedda and names is further played up - in Ibsen's text, Juliana tells Bertha to remember to call her master "doctor" instead of "mister". Bertha replies vaguely that Hedda had already mentioned this to her. But Friel makes this much more emphatic: "It was her first instruction when she stepped into this house".

Likewise, when the young Hedda is evoked in Ibsen's text, Juliana remembers her riding with her father in a long black dress, with a feather in her hat. Friel gives the line about the feather to Bertha and has her add a judgmental touch: "And a feather in her hat, kind of defiant." These changes may seem individually small, but they have the cumulative dramatic impact of setting up Hedda's imperious, self-centred, dangerous nature even before she sets foot on stage.

In this preamble, Ibsen is essentially doing the heavy lifting of exposition, telling us that the young couple, Hedda and George Tesman, have been abroad on honeymoon, that he is a pampered scholar, fussed over by his aunts and that she is the proud daughter of a general. But Friel's version of it is much more vividly dramatic. Juliana is more complex. She has uneasy premonitions. She is at once much warmer - she puts her arms around the servant who is upset at leaving her household - and harsher: where Ibsen has her call George's rival a "poor misguided creature", in Friel's version she calls him an "unfortunate wretch" and an "awful libertine". Bertha herself is not just an all-purpose housemaid, but a stronger character with the ability to talk back. The whole scene is, quite simply, better.

Part of the point of having a classic foreign play retranslated by a major playwright is to give the language a facelift. Friel certainly does this. The clutter of an old English middle-class speech - "Heavens!", "Good lord!", "I say!" - is, as one would expect, swept away. And Friel's dialogue is always more concrete, more energised, than the same lines in standard translations. Instead of saying, "You don't seem to have wasted your time on your wedding trip, George", Juliana says: "So your honeymoon wasn't all gadding about and pleasure then?" Judge Brack's dull opening line, "May one call so early as this?" becomes the infinitely more lively "I know - I know - an unconscionable hour to call on people of feeling". The "mountain air" in Tyrol that has made Hedda plump is changed to "those enormous plates of fruit strudel we devoured in the Tyrol". Instead of asking Hedda to "speak a little more affectionately" to his aunt, Friel has Tesman ask Hedda to call her "Auntie Juju".

The hapless George is greeted by Hedda in the fourth act not with the boringly neutral, "Ah, it's a good thing you're back at last", but with the accusatory, "You took your time". Brack's key line to Hedda towards the climax of the play - "one usually manages to tolerate the inevitable" - becomes the much more direct "People can learn to live with what they can't change".

Motivations are sharpened. In Ibsen's text, Hedda urges Tesman to write to Ejlert Lovborg, but in a vague, almost offhand way. In Friel's, she conjures a vivid image of him painting the town red and flirting with doom, making the invitation much more urgent and obviously manipulative. Hedda herself is funnier and more sardonic. Friel gives her a new explanation for her marriage to the pedantic historian Tesman: "Who could resist domestic crafts in tenth century Holland and cottage industries in east Belgium?"

But there is more going on than verbal refurbishment or dramatic tweaking. Friel's boldest move is to add key speeches, some of them long passages that utterly alter the tenor of Ibsen's relatively truncated naturalistic dialogue. In some crucial moments of the play, Friel has simply decided that Ibsen didn't do enough to bring the characters fully alive and has invented words to bring the hidden backdrop to vivid life.

Tesman's fussing over the return of his favourite slippers, which gets two lines in Ibsen, is expanded into a rapturous evocation of all the flowers embroidered on them. This image is picked up later on with immense poignancy, when Tesman is imagining the children he will have with Hedda - itself a Friel invention.

Likewise, while Ibsen gives the mousy Thea a rather stilted passage in which she describes the development of her relationship with Lovborg, Friel allows her a superbly evocative long speech in which she recalls "The stooped shoulders. The patient hands. The lank hair. But especially the face; and the cornflower blue eyes, those hesitant, irresolute eyes that hinted at weakness. And always, always that wan, apologetic smile that confirmed the weakness. Flinching before the sly bullying of the children and my husband's crude discourtesies". None of this comes from Ibsen: both in its cadences, and in its melancholy compassion, this is pure Friel - and pure dramatic beauty.

Most startlingly, Friel creates a whole new dramatic moment for Tesman when he hears that Hedda is pregnant. In the original this is passed off with a "Good heavens! Can it be possible?" In Friel's version, Tesman is impelled into a sequence of manic activity, accompanied by a rapturous, half-delirious speech in which he imagines the reaction of his friends, the name of the unborn child, the need to book piano lessons. All of this while Hedda sits coldly with her eyes closed muttering: "Oh God . . . dear God . . . oh dear God . . . " The scene becomes immensely poignant and utterly chilling, and it sets up the ending (which Friel also subtly alters) more effectively than Ibsen himself does.

Such radical changes make this Hedda neither a simple translation nor, as the official title has it, a "new version", but something altogether larger. It might be better to borrow a term from classical music - variations. This is Friel's Variations on a Play by Ibsen. The vibrancy, depth and passion of his text show that he sure knows how to play the thing.