HEDDA here, Hedda there, Hedda everywhere. In 2025 there has been a Netflix film, Matthew Dunster’s stage version starring Lily Allen, and now Tanika Gupta brings her take on Ibsen’s masterpiece to the Orange Tree in Richmond.

With such regular stagings of a classic, room for a new angle is often squeezed but Gupta finds an intriguing viewpoint within which to set her post-war London interpretation which stays largely faithful to the plot with a few acute additions.

Hedda, actually Hema, is a recently retired Hollywood star who has been “cleaned out” by the cut-throat studios and is finding asylum from Hollywood in a Chelsea townhouse in 1948. Far more than her financial woes or her “utterly charmless” husband George (Joe Bannister) is the fact that she is masking her dual heritage in an industry, and wider society, that just cannot fathom an Anglo-Indian woman making it in the movies.

Pearl Chanda’s performance in the title role is defined by an inscrutable acidity that undoubtedly achieves its aim to alienate but never truly elucidates much of her motivation as she unleashes Hedda’s well-trodden trail of destruction.

Perhaps that is left purely to Gupta’s text, where movie producer John Brack (a seedy, slick Milo Twomey) and Hedda’s husband continuously indulge in a famous brand of insidious, upper-middle-class English racism that chimes with our retrogressive times.

Consumed by her secrets, Hedda is left at the mercy of these suffocating men but it proves difficult to find much emotional connection with the characters.

Two counterpoints to this are the fiery back-and-forths between Hedda and her mother-disguised-as-maid Shona (an earthy Rina Fatania) which crackle with the post-colonial ferocity of the time. “You should be free. India’s free now,” insists the daughter only for her mother to retort, “But the English are the same.”

Flickers of tenderness also burn briefly between Hedda and Lenny (Jake Mann), a troubled film writer, who shared a dalliance back in Calcutta that the latter has never got over. The scene they share has an intensity that sets it apart from the rest as someone finally understands her and breaks the facade.

Hettie Macdonald’s production never allows the action to stray, moving with a snappy efficiency from one interaction to the next but there is an overriding coldness to the evening that prevents it from ever really taking hold.

Runs until November 22. Box office: (020) 8940-3633, orangetreetheatre.co.uk.