National Theater Company Of Korea Drama Centre TheatreMay 28, 8pm

Australian director Simon Stone once told this reviewer that Korean actors have a mania about them particularly suited for plays of collapse or internal turmoil. Where some cultures might choose temperance, Koreans have a greater fluidity between suffering and joy, manifesting in the sudden yelp, a caricatured curling of the lips, or the violent smack to the back of the head in K-dramas.

National Theatre Company Of Korea’s Hedda Gabler, directed by artistic director Park Jeong-hee, is recognisably in this vein – with the conspicuous exception of the titular manipulator played by Lee Hye-young.

Like most contemporary productions of Henrik Ibsen’s classic, the femme fatale’s witchiness has been dialled down for a portrait of a more flesh-and-blood “female Hamlet”, trialling chaos on a whim for reasons of domestic boredom and existential ennui.

But in comparison to the default mode of Lee’s counterparts – prone to overreactive outbursts – her madness cannot help but feel not just quite mad enough. When she starts a fire, it is quick and perfunctory. Hedda’s unspooling over the night never quite extends beyond facial tics. Even her menace in bullying unfortunate house guest Thea Elvsted feels put on.

Park and Lee may have wanted to cast Hedda Gabler as just one among an ensemble of psychotic characters, or see her as a reasonable product of society’s limiting of avenues for women in search of purpose. But Lee’s unchanging languidity also takes the joy and charismatic tension out of Ibsen.

It feels a waste, for Lee is otherwise extremely watchable and every bit the wry, slinky bewitcher of so many male suitors. Her more quiet performance moves her just a step out of joint with the others – a woman isolated in he...