FOWL PLAY: WHEN THE TRUTH
TAKES AIM IN THE WILD DUCK

Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, now at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Klein Theatre (in a co-production with Theatre for a New Audience), is an excellent, superbly acted rendering of one of his rarely produced tragedies — a work as cynical and heavy-handed as it is symbolic. It poses an age-old question: is truth really better than illusion?

For the Ekdal family, the answer is a resounding no. When Gregers Werle (Alexander Hurt), a self-righteous outsider, exposes a long-buried family secret, his crusade for honesty shatters their fragile peace and leads to ruin.

Maaike Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig, David Patrick Kelly as Old Ekdal, Nick Westrate
as Hjalmar Ekdal, Melanie Field as Gina Ekdal, Alexander Hurt as Gregers Werle

Hjalmar Ekdal (Nick Westrate) is married to Gina (Melanie Field), once a servant to Håkon Werle (Robert Stanton), a wealthy industrialist who arranged their marriage. Håkon’s son, Gregers, believes his late mother was driven to despair by Gina’s affair with his father—and is horrified to learn that his old friend Hjalmar may be living a lie. In his moral fervor, Gregers reveals the news—under the guise that the truth shall set you free—that Hjalmar’s beloved daughter, Hedvig (Maaike Laanstra-Corn), may in fact be Håkon’s child, and all hell breaks loose.

Alexander Hurt, Nick Westrate

Here comes the symbolism.

Hedvig, whose eyesight is failing, finds solace in her pet wild duck—ironically wounded by Håkon himself, whose own vision is also deteriorating. Both child and bird are captive creatures: Hedvig is kept from school under the pretext of being tutored by her distracted father, while the duck lives confined in the attic. By the end, they are symbolically one and the same—each a casualty of good intentions and human blindness.

Maaike Laanstra-Corn, Melanie Field

If you can accept the play’s moral severity, the talented cast—under Simon Godwin’s direction of David Eldridge’s supple translation—brings Ibsen’s psychological realism and deep moral complexities into sharp focus. Driving the plot, Hurt’s Gregers is a convincing villain, a zealot of “chronic righteousness” (as his friend Relling diagnoses), a man whose obsession with moral purity makes him as destructive as he is principled. Westrate’s Hjalmar, prattling about a half-imagined invention, is heartbreakingly gullible and vulnerable to Gregor’s machinations. With a no-nonsense attitude, Field’s Gina has the weary pragmatism of someone who’s learned to live with compromise, while Laanstra-Corn’s Hedvig, a dependent, immature, and overly sensitive teen—the victim of a broken home—trembles between innocence and despair.

David Patrick Kelly

Andrew Boyce’s richly detailed set captures the Ekdals’ working-class apartment, complete with the attic “hunting ground” where Old Ekdal (David Patrick Kelly)—a disgraced former partner of Håkon Werle who is now a broken man, living in poverty and doing odd copying jobs—recreates his lost world of respectability. Adding to this production’s lamentations are Sound Designer Darron L. West’s haunting musical interludes, performed by Music Director Alexander Sovronsky, who plays Norwegian folk and classical music on the viola, Hardanger fiddle, and langeleik between set changes.

Nick Westrate

The wild duck—and the family it mirrors—are fragile creatures, both trapped by good intentions. This production doesn’t cushion their fall; it lets us watch as the truth takes aim.

The Wild Duck—the bird and the play—are fragile entities to be handled with care. This production—a study of psychological realism— does just that.

photos by Hollis King and Gerry Goodstein

The Wild Duck
Shakespeare Theatre Company
co-production with Theatre for a New Audience
Klein Theatre, 450 7th St. NW
two hours and 30 minutes with one 15-minute intermission
ends on November 16, 2025
for tickets, call 202.547.1122 or visit STC