"2024's Hedda Gabler" continues to speak of a society with distorted human relations, where ideals and gestures of grandeur are swallowed up by superficiality, hypocrisy and derisory aspirations based on financial reasons. There is not the compelling need to survive, though there are many stakes on the table, but a need to defeat vanities and egos through criminal acts, from rape to incitement to murder and suicide. Ghoulishly, but not shockingly, these people will always get to the point where their strategies will fail in a "ridiculous and trivial" point.

Teodora Andreoiu, Happ.ro - The pettiness of compromise in a world of empty ideals - "Hedda Gabler"   

"The directorial proposal that Thomas Ostermeier first made in 2005, at Schaubhüne, becomes a reality on the stage of the National Theatre in an elegant, precise staging, clear in its intentions, solid in its interpretation, with a minimalist aesthetic that is visually very effective, emotionally moderate and without unnecessary technical artifices. It seems a middle way chosen specifically to put a text that was bold 200 years ago into a contemporary perspective.

Today, Hedda's extravagance and controversial gestures can no longer scandalize a society that is much, much more clement and less literally and figuratively enmeshed in social mores, rules of conduct and formal structures. The status of the rebellious contemporary Victorian wife has nothing to do with 21st century feminism. The relevance of the staging lies in the option of plausible speculation about the characters' relationships and motivations."

Alina Epîngeac, Blog - "Hedda Gabler" is us   

''The great merit of Hedda Gabler, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, is that it reminded me of Henrik Ibsen. As the director has related to the text, Hedda makes you think, forces you into a position of power with each individual character, with whom you don't want to identify, but with whom you end up cohabiting. You get inside each one's mind, resonating with the weaknesses of one or another of the characters parading their poorly-remorseful souls. Hedda destroys what she can't have, she dominates through this force of destruction, which fully justifies suicide and all other antisocial acts. You end by understanding her, passing through a harsh judgment of her every action, so that in the end her lack of courage is totally justified."

Nona Rapotan, Bookhub - Hedda Gabler's lesson - don't destroy what you can't have   

"A remake of a production that the famous director Thomas Ostermeier signed for the first time at the Schaubhüne Berlin in 2005, "Hedda Gabler" reveals in Bucharest the charm and refinement of a different kind of theater, with which our audience is not exactly accustomed, a psychological, rational theater, very well tempered, in a strong and pertinent visual frame, which will definitely put its mark on our minds as representative of the theater, not at all comfortable, proposed by Ibsen.

A performance of patience and silence, a sad ode to inner rebellion and boredom as important silences of the soul, trapped without solutions in compromises, compromises that more or less somewhere in the complicated socio-emotional mechanism dominated by the mercantile in which we must each find our place, to prove, to succeed. Often trampling on our hearts, our aspirations and our loves, if only and only in order to join the world, which is more and more insatiable with every compromise we make. Pushing us often to live on the edge of morality, in a neurotic-egoistic self-expression, going so far as to kill everything we love, just to protect ourselves. If only mentally."

Luciana Antofi, Blog - Post-it with blood and lilies shot on Ostermeier's cross wall at the National Theatre: David Bowie between Hedda Gabler's mirrors   

"For me, the performance staged by the German director Thomas Ostermeier at the National Theatre in Bucharest after an adaptation of Ibsen's play is a sum of states explored intensely, subtly, clearly cut and impeccably interpreted by all the actors chosen in the cast. First of all, the direction in which the adaptation goes, supported by the translation by Ozana Oancea in a lively, colorful, direct language, relieves the text of a certain load, of a weight that today would have seemed heavy, inefficient. Some scenes are removed, others shortened. The show's freshness and rhythm come directly from the somewhat colloquial language of today. Nothing sounds theistic anymore, beyond certain words and accents there is drama, continuously, like a permanent pressure that doubles what is seen, what is played, what is spoken, what is heard. A tension of situations, of relationships, heightened by space as the key image, of projections that present black and white the dark Hedda, deep in thought and in solitude, a visual commentary without words, an X-ray."

Marina Constantinescu, România literară - Hedda. Hedda Gabler (II)   

Translated by Andreea Codrea-Boeriu