Hedda at the Orange Tree Theatre: ‘Super-smart but lacks tension’

Gupta was inspired by the life of Golden Age Hollywood actress Merle Oberon, who always insisted she was Australian when it turned out she was Anglo-Indian – The Hays Code, which governed what films of the time could show, prohibited depictions of ‘miscegenation’. Here, the setting isn’t 19th-century Norway but Chelsea in the late forties, just after India gained independence from Britain; Hedda is an Anglo-Indian actress too, also hiding her heritage, an act of self-denial that is tearing her apart, and has forced her to retire.