The Serious Game: Ingmar Bergman as Stage Director 9789048523672

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The Serious Game

The Serious Game Ingmar Bergman as Stage Director

Egil Törnqvist

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Ingmar Bergman directs Lena Endre as Elizabeth and Mikael Persbrandt as Leicester in Friedrich von Schiller’s Maria Stuart (Mary Stuart) at Dramaten in Stockholm 2000. Photo: Bengt Wanselius. Cover design: Sander Pinkse Boekproducties Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 678 1 e-isbn 978 90 4852 367 2 doi 10.5117/9789089646781 nur 670 © E. Törnqvist / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2015 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Egil Törnqvist 1932-2015

The internationally renowned Strindberg and Bergman scholar Egil Törnqvist, professor emeritus at the University of Amsterdam, passed away on March 9, 2015 after a short illness. Törnqvist was born on December 19, 1932 in Uppsala, where he also began his academic studies. After completing his B.A. and M.A. degrees he became a lecturer in Swedish at Harvard University (1957-1958). Returning to Uppsala he continued his graduate work and completed an advanced degree (fil.lic.) in 1962. During the next several years (1963-1969) he served as research assistant in Drama Studies and defended his doctoral thesis on Eugene O’Neill in 1968, which led to an assistant professorship in Literature/ Drama Studies at his alma mater. In the following year (1969) he began a long academic career as Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He remained in Amsterdam until his death and considered the city and its academic environment his real domicile. Egil Törnqvist focussed much of his research on August Strindberg as a dramatist and on the film and theatre productions of Ingmar Bergman. He established a broad international network in these academic fields. He was the main organizer of the eight Strindberg Conference in Amsterdam in 1986 and became an esteemed contributor to such scholarly journals as Strindbergiana, Scandinavica, Scandinavian Studies, Theatre Studies and Modern Drama. Fluent in Swedish, English and Dutch, Törnqvist lectured frequently at international conferences and at a number of European and American universities. Many of his articles were translated into Italian, Polish, Russian and Czech. Among his very large production of book-length works, many of them published by Amsterdam University Press, are the following: Strindberg’s Miss Julie: A Play and its Transpositions (with Barry Jacobs), 1988; Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, 1995; Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata: From Text to Performance, 2000; Strindberg on Drama and Theatre (with Birgitta Steene), 2007. Shortly before his death, Törnqvist completed the current AUP volume on Ingmar Bergman’s stage productions.

For his extensive research, Egil Törnqvist was awarded the Swedish Strindberg Prize in 2004. The award committee’s motivation was that in using the world as his arena “Egil Törnqvist made clear the uniqueness of Strindberg’s dramas and their impact on playwrights and filmmakers in our time.” Birgitta Steene Professor emerita in cinema studies and Scandinavian literature at the University of Washington.

Contents Preface 9 1. B & Co.

13

2. William Shakespeare, King Lear

25

3. August Strindberg, Miss Julie

39

4. August Strindberg, A Dream Play

55

5. William Shakespeare, Hamlet 69 6. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

87

7. Yukio Mishima, Madame de Sade

101

8. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House

115

9. Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt

129

10. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

143

11. J.B.P. Molière, The Misanthrope

157

12. Euripides, The Bacchae

171

13. August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata

183

14. Friedrich von Schiller, Mary Stuart

195

15. Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts 209 16. The Serious Game

223

Production Data

237

Bibliography 253 DVD list

259

Index 263

Preface Film is an international medium, theatre a national one. As a film director, Ingmar Bergman (hereafter B) is world-famous; as a stage director he is little known outside his own country. Even if some of B’s stage productions have been seen not only in Sweden but also abroad, the number of people attending them was very limited compared to the number that has attended his films. Moreover, before the invention of supertexts a non-Swedish theatre audience was forced either to listen to a language they did not understand or listen to an undramatic translation via earphones. The media dichotomy is reflected in the disproportionate attention that has been devoted to B as a film and as a stage director. While there are by now some fifty books on B as a film director, only a handful concern themselves with his work in the theatre. And yet his 171 stage productions by far outnumber his 77 film and TV productions. When Henrik Sjögren published his book Ingmar Bergman på teatern in 1968, it was the first time a survey was given of B’s stage productions. This was followed in 2002 by his Lek och raseri: Ingmar Bergman’s teater 1938-2002, covering B’s total stage career. Himself a theatre critic, Sjögren’s analyses are based partly on his own impressions of the performances and partly, and more extensively, on impressions by various, mostly Swedish, theatre critics. In addition, both books contain dialogues with B on the various productions. In 1982, Lise-Lone and Frederick J. Marker published their Ingmar Bergman: Four Decades in the Theater, which was then revised, expanded and published ten years later under the title Ingmar Bergman: A Life in the Theater. Both books focus on Molière, Ibsen, and Strindberg productions. And both contain conversations with B on theatre. Extremely useful is Birgitta Steene’s well-documented survey “Ingmar Bergman in the Theatre” (455-762) in her extensive Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide (2005). Unlike Sjögren and the Markers, my analyses are largely based on my own impressions both of the live and the video-recorded presentations. The analyses often relate the visual elements to the dialogue, frequently in the form of transcriptions of directorially rewarding passages. This I consider essential, since a description of merely the visual and acoustic aspects and not the connected verbal ones easily remains vague. Comments on B as a stage director in the introductory chapter “B & Co.” rely to some extent on impressions during my attendance of B’s rehearsals of his third production of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata in the fall of 1972.

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Much could be said about the process leading to the finished play productions. In the present book, I limit myself to end results and let the proof be in the pudding. Another limitation is the restriction to fourteen of B’s late productions, all of them from 1984 to 2002, all of them based on classical dramas. The choice of late productions was natural for several reasons. Not only was B now an exceedingly experienced director, often referred to as maestro. He had also, after a less successful period at the Residenztheater in Munich, returned to what he called the paternal house, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, commonly known as Dramaten, where all his subsequent stage performances took place in his own native tongue. He had stopped directing films. Last but not least, from this period several relatively good video recordings of the stage performances are available. The fact that all the productions discussed here are based on classical dramas has the advantage that the texts are easily available both in the original language and in translation. The fourteen video recordings, by now transmitted to dvd, are all in colour. The oldest of them, King Lear, exists in two versions, one in blackand-white, with a fixed camera showing the whole stage, and another in colour with a movable camera showing the actors in medium shots and close-ups. The former version is unable to show mimicry, small gestures and objects. The latter does not inform us about what the rest of the stage looks like. The two versions are in other words complementary. This is an ideal situation and it is regrettable that it has not been followed up in later recordings. In the single versions bestowed on them we find variation between long shots, showing the whole stage, medium shots and, occasionally, close-ups. What we get is something between the objectivity of the theatre and the subjectivity of the film. The two-dimensionality of the video may make it difficult to assess actors’ movements in relation to the stage depth (Heed, 1989: 99). Projections and dark areas may be difficult to discern. But the possibility of stopping, rewinding, and repeating images and sequences in the recordings is an enormous asset, although this possibility violates “the dictate of the temporal uniqueness of the theatre event” (Pavis, 1982: 123). As appears from the Production Data (p. 237), most of the recordings took place before opening night, but a few took place after it. In either case, the recorded version may differ from that of the opening night, witnessed by the reviewers. In the versions of Peer Gynt and The Bacchae the acting is here and there interrupted by instructions from B. Apart from the recordings, I was able to study the production scripts, that is, the scripts of the version-to-be-played handled by the actors as

Preface

11

well as almost all of B’s prompt scripts. In addition to this material, the reviews, usually appearing the day after the opening night (and therefore here undated), have provided helpful insights and corroborations. Although stage productions are the result of team work where actors play a crucial part, I have refrained from mentioning actors’ names – they can all be found in the section on Production Data at the end – in order not to encumber the reading and in the awareness that most of these names are unknown to a non-Swedish audience. This should not be seen as a sign of playing down the actors’ contributions which, as already mentioned, were crucial. As the title of my introductory chapter, B & Co., indicates the letter B should frequently be spelled out “B as leader of the production team.” A theatre performance sooner or later belongs to the past. When theatre critics use present tense in their reviews, it is because the performance is still running, probably will stay on for some time, and consequently can be attended by the readers of the review in question. For the theatre historian it is more natural to use past tense – the tense used here – for performances that are passed and gone. The existence of recordings of performances on video/dvd cannot change the fact that these are based on live, that is, non-repeatable theatrical events. For stage directions, I use italics throughout. Speaker labels and character designations are put in roman low-case capitals. References to reviews in the running text lack dates since it can be assumed that all reviews have appeared shortly after the premiere, the date of which is given in the list of production data. In the productions examined here Euripides’ Greek, Shakespeare’s English, Molière’s French, and Schiller’s German were usually rather freely rendered into Swedish. As a result the Swedish target texts often deviate considerably from the source texts. All quotations from the productions are in my own English rendering of the Swedish texts. A substantial part of this book has appeared earlier. Chapter 3 relies partly on pp. 163-85 in mine and Barry Jacobs’ Strindberg’s Miss Julie: A Play and Its Transpositions, (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1988). Chapter 6 was originally published as “Ingmar Bergman Directs Long Day’s Journey into Night” in New Theatre Quarterly, V: 20, 1989, and as “Proxemics on Page and Stage: O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night – and Bergman’s” in North-West Passage (Torino), 5, 2008. Short sections of Chapters 7 and 12 earlier appeared as “Mishima’s Madame de Sade on Stage and on Television” and “Euripides’ The Bacchae as Opera, Television Opera, and Stage Play” in Bergman’s Muses: Æsthetic Versatility in Film, Theatre, Television and Radio, (Jefferson, NC/London: McFarland, 2003). Chapter 8 is partly based on

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“Ingmar Bergman’s Doll’s Houses,” Scandinavica, 30:1, May 1991. Chapter 10 owes much to “Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale” in my Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995). Chapter 13 appeared as “Ingmar Bergman’s fjärde Spöksonat” in Strindbergiana, 16, ed. Birgitta Steene, (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2001). Chapter 15 was earlier published as “Ingmar Bergman’s Gengångare” in Nordisk Tidskrift, 82:4, 2006. All these publications have here been thoroughly revised. For invaluable assistance I am much indebted to Dr. Dag Kronlund, librarian at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and his assistant Christine Sundberg, as well as to Dr. Jan Holmberg, head of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation in Stockholm.

1.

B & Co.

Most directors have opted for one or a few artistic media: theatre, film, radio, television, opera. B opted for them all. But two of them took precedence: theatre and film. His comparison of the former to his wife, the latter to his mistress, has become legendary. There was always a close connection between the two, between his work for the stage and his work for the screen: My films are only a distillation of what I do in the theatre. Theatre work is sixty percent.... Not even considering the connection between The Seventh Seal and my production of Ur-Faust (although they came about in the reverse order). Not even considering the connection between The Face [The Magician in the U.S.] and my production of Six Characters in Search of an Author in Malmö. (B in Sjöman, 1963: 102)

Seven years later, he declared: “Between my job at the theater and my job in the film studio it has always been a very short step indeed. Sometimes it has paid off, and sometimes it has been a drawback. But it has always been a short step between” (B, 1973: 99). As a stage director B was living with a particular play in heart and mind for long periods. Many of these plays left traces in the films. The Seventh Seal grew out of a play, Wood Painting. Smiles of a Summer Night “is constructed like a piece by Marivaux – in the classical 18th century manner” (B, 1973: 66f.). Through a Glass Darkly is “a surreptitious stage-play” (ib. 163). Winter Light took shape in his mind as “a medieval play” (B, 1994b: 258). B himself made a stage version of his TV series Scenes from a Marriage and many of his films have later been adapted into stage plays. As a film maker, Marianne Höök claimed, B “is always primarily the man of the theater who distrusts technical shortcuts, relying solely on the human being and the spoken word” (Cowie, 1992: 300). There is much to be said for the view that “no other film director after the breakthrough of the sound film has been so influenced by the theatre” (Zern, 1993: 59). B’s theatrical orientation is further corroborated by his frequent use of stage or stage-like performances in his films (Koskinen, 1993: 155-262). When we reverse the picture and look at cinematic qualities in B’s stage productions, we may think of such an obvious phenomenon as the use of projections in the productions of A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and The Ghost Sonata. But we may also think of the tendency to replace a firm act structure with a looser scene structure. We may think of the added initial

14 

The Serious Game

action preceding the action proper; compare the use of pre-title sequences in screen drama. We may think of the focussing on the characters’ faces through positioning and lighting. Or of the use of slow-motion or frozen movements on the stage. Last but not least, B’s experience from film direction undoubtedly sharpened his awareness of how to direct “the audience’s attention […] to certain circumstances on the stage” (B in Sjögren, 1968: 293). Lighting has, due to the fast technical development, become an exceedingly important element in stage performances. B’s experience as a film director helped to make him aware of the potentials of light, also in the theatre. Referring to Sven Nykvist, he once told an interviewer: “Our common passion – and I feel this even on the stage – is to create light: light and faces surrounded by shadows. This is what fascinates me!” (Kaminsky, 1975: 129f.) In another interview, he gave an illuminating example: “The actors’ relation to the stage is also a part of the rhythm of the performance, and if you change the angle at which the light strikes the stage, you achieve a completely new rhythm” (B in Marker/Marker, 1992: 17). In B’s work dream and reality were closely interwoven and the theatre – this home of dreams – frequently became a metaphor for this world of illusions. The theatre family in Fanny and Alexander is named Ekdahl in recognition of the fact that, like Ibsen’s Ekdal family in The Wild Duck, they live by illusions. Emilie Ekdahl’s exit from the theatre and return to it – she has a predecessor in Elisabet Vogler in Persona – is paradigmatic for her ambivalent attitude to the house of illusions and to the reality outside that is so characteristic of many of B’s figures as well as of their creator.1 B was a director already in the nursery, where he staged plays in his puppet theatre. “I leant over my toy theatre,” he once said, “my games making me ruler of the stage, my imagination populating it” (B, 1989: 20); the description is that of an omnipotent director. B’s debut as a stage director in the proper sense took place in 1938 when he was 20. At about the same time he started writing fiction, mostly plays. In the 1940s a few of them were published and produced, some directed by B himself. One of them, Jack Among the Actors, deals with a troupe of actors who are treated like puppets by their autocratic director. “There was a frustrated dramatist in me,” he confessed in the mid-1950s. “I wrote stage plays for the screen in those days, because the theatre seemed closed to me” (Steene, 1972: 43).

1 In his Erasmus speech (1965), B stated that “people today can reject the theater,” since in the TV age they “live in the midst of a drama which is constantly exploding in local tragedy” (B, 1972: 14).

B & Co.

15

Directors like Torsten Hammarén, Olof Molander, and Alf Sjöberg were important mentors. Hammarén “taught me the methodological rudiments of stagecraft. In a ruthless way he took me out of the notion of emotional wallowing, i.e., of feeling your way [into a production] and of talking about things” (B in Steene, 2005: 460). Molander was the leading Swedish stage director in the thirties and forties, especially renowned for his Strindberg productions. In the theatre program for his 1945 performance of Strindberg’s The Pelican, B stated his indebtedness to Molander who: has made us see the magic in Strindberg’s dramaturgy. [...] [He] gives us Strindberg without embellishments or directional visions, tunes in to the text, and leaves it at that. He makes us hear the poet’s anxiety-driven fever pulse. [...] We listen to a strange, muted chamber music. [...] First it was A Dream Play. Night after night I stood in the wings and sobbed and never really knew why. After that came To Damascus, Saga of the Folkungs, and The Ghost Sonata. It is the sort of thing you never forget and never leave behind, especially if you happen to be a director […].

Alf Sjöberg was for a long time the chief director at Dramaten, responsible for many successful productions. Although different in other respects, the three directors shared a rather authoritarian attitude to the actors, typical for the period. This attitude suited B well. Early described as a demonic director, B has been characterised as a representative of “the despotic type of direction” in the tradition of Olof Molander and Torsten Hammarén by Keve Hjelm (2004: 130), himself an outstanding actor and director.2 …As head of Dramaten he reformed the theatre in several respects. He increased the influence of the actors on decision-making. He improved possibilities for a children’s theatre. And he organized public rehearsals.

At the end of the 1960s, under influence of the Vietnam War, the cultural climate in Sweden changed. In addition to the traditional, institutionalised theatres, free theatre groups arose. Politically left-wing, they regarded theatre as a weapon in the struggle for a less elitist, more equal society and applied strictly democratic principles to their work. Plays were written by the groups themselves and were thoroughly debated by the cast during 2 Bengt Forslund (2003: 248, 264) has pointed to several professional similarities between Olof Molander and B.

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rehearsals. Rather than being the supreme leader, the director was one of the group. And the group was expected to embrace a left-wing standpoint that agreed with ideas behind the productions. B soon came into conflict with this politicised form of theatre which he experienced as intolerant and neurotically topical. The free theatre groups, on their part, regarded B’s work as elitist and his direction as authoritarian. B’s “paternal home,” The Royal Dramatic Theatre, founded in 1788, is Sweden’s national theatre. Its present edifice, centrally located in Stockholm, was erected in 1908 and is considered one of the capital’s most beautiful Jugend buildings. In the period we are here concerned with some 370 people were employed at the theatre, about 80 of whom were actors. Nearly 1400 performances were given every season on six stages. Three of these were used by B: the Big Stage, a traditional proscenium stage with a horse-shoe-formed auditorium seating 805; the Small Stage, a rebuilt cinema, this too a proscenium stage seating 345; and the (former) Paint Room, a flexible stage seating 200. While the Big Stage is hierarchic, some seats being better and more expensive than others, the Small Stage and the Paint Room are democratic in their arrangement of seats. The Paint Room was B’s favourite stage. Thinking perhaps of Strindberg’s Intimate Theatre which contained about as many equal seats, B’s plan was to make this stage his own once he had stopped filming (Sjögren, 2002: 111). “The Paint Room is a wonderful locality,” he found, “with perfect contact with the audience. We have found the right sightlines, everyone sees well” (ib.: 342). The Big Stage, on the other hand, was acoustically somewhat problematic. “The second and third balconies are excellent. But if you wish to be heard, for instance, between rows 6 and 12 in the stalls, you need to have a good diction” (ib.: 245). In 1993 the machinery of the Big Stage was digitalised. Like most theatres in Sweden, Dramaten had in B’s time, and still has, a primarily middle-class audience. In 1983, one year before B’s production of King Lear, an investigation of Dramaten’s audience showed that 68% of the theatre-goers were well-educated, 65% were women, 53% were politically liberal or conservative, 38% had seen 3-5 productions in that same year, four out of five were Stockholmers; classical plays and comedies were favoured (Nowak in Näslund/Sörenson, 1988: 200). The reasons for a visit to a Dramaten production would vary from confidence in the quality of the productions at the theatre to confidence in the director (very relevant in B’s case), interest in particular actors, or in the play that was being performed. Of great importance was the difference between spectators with and without a theatre program; unlike the latter, the former received

B & Co.

17

additional information about the play to be performed, information that would often influence their reception of the performance. “Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not good for us.” Antonin Artaud’s (1958: 74) heretic standpoint clashed with B’s which on the contrary maintained that “the classics express the problems of our time better than the plays of our own time” (Expressen Feb. 13, 1973), a major reason, it seems, why most of the plays he directed at Dramaten between 1984-2002 were indeed classics. Peter Brook (1972: 38) expressed himself to the same effect: “all the theatres can do is make an unhappy choice between great traditional writing or far less good modern works.” Charles Marowitz (1986: 6), too, was in favour of the classics: “The special virtue of a classic is that it can mean again and again – above and beyond what it originally meant. It is a compliment to its endless resourcefulness, its ability constantly to recreate itself like the chameleon that it is.” In the 1970’s, B said in an interview, the attitude to the classics was negative: the classics weren’t to be played as classics. They had to be rewritten or butchered, reduced to public polemics or private confrontations. They were dismantled and disarmed. Instead of showing the unadulterated classics in all their explosive energy, an effort was made to reduce them to something cut and dried, clear and concise, easy to comprehend. (Bergström, 1995: 18).

This evaluation provokes the question: How “unadulterated” were the classics B himself produced in the following decades? In the subsequent chapters this question will be dealt with. B was not interested in the absurdists and referred to them as “fast food for impatient people.” He never did Beckett or Pinter. He did not care for political theatre and he staged Brecht only once: The Threepenny Opera. He was indifferent to Lars Norén, since the mid-1980s Sweden’s most important and most successful dramatist. The primary reason for his choice of a particular play, B often assessed, was that he had the right actors for it (Sjögren, 2002: 428). He would have liked to direct Amorina and The Queen’s Jewel by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, both staged by Alf Sjöberg, but never felt that he had “the right cast” for these plays (ib.: 184). Mishima’s Madame de Sade with its all-woman cast was suitable because he could get precisely the actresses he wanted (ib.: 429). During rehearsals of Miss Julie he sensed that Peter Stormare would make a good Hamlet. Watching Pernilla Östergren rehearsing

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in his fourth Dream Play he realised that “f inally, after many years of waiting, the Royal Dramatic Theatre had a new Nora” (B, 1994b: 321); three years later she was to take up this part in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. A major reason for the choice of Schiller’s Maria Stuart was that Pernilla August and Lena Endre were both available for the main parts (Dagens Nyheter Feb. 19, 1999). Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Strindberg are dramatists B frequently returned to.3 Of these, Strindberg held a special place. Strindberg, he early declared, “expressed things which I’d experienced and which I couldn’t find words for” (B, 1973: 24). A major reason why B turned to directing was no doubt that as a director he could express audiovisually what he was unable or less able to express verbally. 4 Every theatre production, we now take for granted, has a director. But B distinguished between plays which need a director and plays which don’t. The plays by Marivaux, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, he maintained, need no director (Marker/ Marker, 1992: 15).5 Unlike a dramatist, a director is necessarily socially involved. “I have an enormous need of contact with other people,” B told Timm (1994: 153), adding that his profession highly fulfilled this need, especially in the theatre where he would be surrounded by much the same people for long periods. Although the head of Dramaten was and is officially responsible for the repertoire each season and for the actors taking part in the productions, B always had a strong, usually decisive, voice in both matters with regard to his own productions (Löfgren, 2003: 401). As a master director he could “without much discussion stage whatever he wanted, with whom he wanted it and how he wanted it” (Kronlund, 2007: 254). “I have produced what I wished to do or what I was told to do or what I felt obliged to do.” he once told Sjögren (1968: 303). About the road from first concept to production, B has said: The fun part is the conception. The playfulness, the dreaming, the fun and games are in the notebooks – the wonderful feeling of total freedom, that you can do what you want. Then, when you have to codify this in 3 By a gentlemen’s agreement between them Alf Sjöberg had the rights to perform Shakespeare. When he died in 1980, B was free to take over this task. 4 Early in his career B was often abused by literary oriented critics for his defective dialogue. Gradually they changed their minds and instead began to praise it. 5 In the case of O’Neill B would prove right. When he rehearsed it several years later he soon found himself reduced to “rehearsal custodian” (Löfgren, 1997: 141).

B & Co.

19

contact with the script and the actors, that’s when it’s important to keep the fun from turning to tedium. You have to re-create it with painstaking care and attention to detail. I have to sit at my desk at home and draw scenery [i.e. blocking] and try to transform what I thought was fun and fanciful into boring arrows and figures. Then this, in turn, has to be communicated to the actors and tap into their creativity, so that they, too, feel all the freedom, fun, and joy. For me, theatrical work has always broken down into a fun period, when time flies, and a dull, pedantic period. […] There is a tremendous sense of satisfaction when I see that the actors are enjoying their work. When we get warm contact during the rehearsals, when they look eagerly at me because they sense we’re on the same wavelength, on the same track. Then I feel that all the boring, hard work I’ve put into my prompt books has been worthwhile. (Bergström, 1995: 19f.)

B’s prompt books bear witness of the director’s careful planning. They are crammed with “arrows and figures” indicating the various blockings during the performances. On the pages opposite the ones containing the script B sometimes wrote down comments on the situation at hand; this was presumably done during rehearsals. During the rehearsal period B, unusually versatile in his profession, was thoroughly involved in all aspects of the performance: scenery, costumes, choreography, light, sound, music. Usually instructing the actors from a distance, he would occasionally get very close to them and be very concrete in his instructions (for an example see fragment 3 of The Bacchae on the dvd disc). In interviews he was nevertheless often modest about his own role as director. “There is nothing but actors’ theatre! The director is merely an appendage,” he would claim (Timm, 1994: 148). He or she is simply “the ear and the eye, the safety factor, the stimulator, the coordinator, the leader and, to some extent, the teacher” (Sjögren, 1968: 300). Actors, he declared, like working with me and it’s easy to explain. As a professional I’ve devoted all my time to learning how an actor functions, how to get the best results out of him. Since the actor is my chief instrument I have to learn how to collaborate one hundred percent, and that’s something I’ve gradually figured out. They know they’ll get all the service, the stimulation, and technical assistance they need. (B, 1993: 251)

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Actors, he maintained at another time, are independent people, exceedingly creative, and they fare best and feel happiest if they get a chance to be creative themselves – get ideas, find out, formulate. [...] If the director who has spent several months on the play before the rehearsals start pours all his ideas about it over the actors, he paralyses their creative faculties. If he feels that the actors themselves are about to express what he himself has intended from the beginning, he only needs to grab hold of their ideas and perhaps develop them further. If he feels that his intentions are not expressed, he can inject them through a piece of stage business or some such thing. It is very important that the actors feel that they are independently creative, and that the director is there primarily to record, to create a sense of security, to stimulate and to guarantee a certain homogeneity. (Törnqvist, 2000: 179)

Director Vogler, B’s alter ego in After the Rehearsal similarly observes: “Actors are creative artists, but not particularly verbal. You have [as a director] to listen, be patient, and wait. You can’t talk the actor’s often uncertain and unclear ideas into the ground” (B, 2001: 22). The most important task of an actor, B (1989: 41) once pointed out, “is to focus on and respond to his fellow player. With no you, no I, as a wise person once put it.” Many of B’s actors were undoubtedly creative during rehearsals. As marionettes they could not have managed their parts the way they did. But to what extent and how they were creative is difficult to ascertain. Neither B nor any of the actors provide concrete examples. In his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, B gives a succinct description of his directorial work: As I harbour a constant tumult within me and have to keep watch over it, I also suffer agony when faced with the unforeseen, the unpredictable. The exercise of my profession thus becomes a pedantic administration of the unspeakable. I act as an intermediary, organizing, ritualizing. […] I hate tumult, aggression or emotional outbursts. […]A rehearsal is proper work, not private therapy for producer and actor. […] I am never my private self. I observe, register, establish and control. I am the actor’s surrogate eye and ear. I suggest, entice, encourage or refuse. I am not spontaneous, impulsive or a fellow actor. It only looks as if I am. If I were to raise the mask for one moment and say what I really feel, my friends would turn on me and throw me out of the window.

B & Co.

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Despite the mask, I am nevertheless not in disguise. My intuition speaks swiftly and clearly. I am totally present. The mask is a filter but nothing irrelevantly private is allowed to penetrate through. My own tumult must be kept in place. (B, 1989: 33ff.)6

Testimonies by four prominent actors – two male, two female – complement these self-descriptions of B as stage director: Some directors have fantastic visions but cannot help the actor practically. This is where B is supreme. He can really help practically. With his blocking. With his enormously sensitive ear. He only needs to say “we’ll have a pause here,” and it solves something and creates completely new notes. He is unbeatable. (Anita Björk in Näslund/Sörenson, 1988: 227). B is, artistically, a rather tender-hearted person and if you show willpower yourself he respects it – at the same time he has a method to get things his way, while at the same time you believe that it becomes the way you yourself want it. (Ulf Johanson in Näslund/Sörenson, 1988: 221) He puts the stake [during rehearsals] as high as we actors. That’s why he is such a brilliant director. (Agneta Ekmanner in Wirmark, 1996: 29) Ingmar’s disciplinary philosophy I experience as extremely rewarding. Actors are rarely disciplined. They need someone who takes hold of them and says “Will you please.” […] His fits of rage […] I often experience as […] well calculated and having a certain effect. (Max von Sydow in Wirmark, 1996: 25, 29)

According to von Sydow, B often talked about the rhythm, pauses, and silences. He liked to use musical terms and preferred the term choreography to blocking when explaining how he positioned actors in relation to one another and to the audience and how he conceptualised their movements and gestures (Marker/Marker, 1992:12). When asked whether he made use of any particular acting method, for example those of Stanislavsky or Strasberg, B simply answered “My own!” He added that the normal rehearsal period would be eight to ten weeks (B, 1993: 252), thereby indicating the thoroughness of the productions. Each 6 Virtually the same description is given by B’s alter ego, director Henrik Vogler, in the TV play After the Rehearsal.

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play meant a new challenge, needed its own approach (Steene, 2005: 470). Disinterested in ideological theories about play production, B’s ‘method’ was primarily intuitive, pragmatic, and highly individual. Seeing the play text as a score, B frequently claimed that he made “no changes or additions that he did not extract from the notes” (Sjögren, 1968: 313). “I cannot and will not stage a play against the writer’s intentions. And I never have deliberately. I have always regarded myself as an interpreter, a re-creator” (ib.: 293). Thirty-four years later he said: “An author may not always be conscious of why he does something in a special way but if you interpret what he has unconsciously created, then it lives” (Sjögren, 2002: 358). These are odd remarks from a director who actually made substantial cuts in the play texts to facilitate efficiency and intelligibility, and who sometimes did not hesitate to change play sequences and add bits of his own. As we shall see, B’s assurance of fidelity to the text badly agrees with his practice.7 On the other hand, compared to the radical play adaptations applied today by many directors, B’s departures from the play texts seem quite modest. A primary concern for B was always how to stimulate the imagination of the audience and make them emotionally involved in the action. What mattered was the audience’s ability to dispense with their disbelief and let the performance take place in their imagination. This did not mean that the audience accepted the action as real. The spectator, B found, continually undergoes changes of mind, changes in his concentration. […] From being completely involved at one instant the spectator is at the very next instant aware of being in the theatre. The next second he is involved again, completely involved; then after three seconds he is back again in the theatre” (Marker, 1983: 251).

The director could help in this back-and-forth movement: “I believe that if you pull the audience out of the action for a time and then lead them back into it, you will increase emotional sensibility and receptivity instead of diminishing it” (ib.: 252). On the stage, Henrik Vogler, B’s alter ego in After the Rehearsal, says, “everything represents, nothing is” (B, 2001: 24). B had earlier exemplified this with the parable of the magic chair:

7

For a criticism of B’s claim to faithfulness to the source text, see Törnqvist, 2008: 276ff.

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You put an ordinary simple chair on the stage. And then you ask the audience to take well care of it, for it is made of platin art glass and worth 19 million dollars. You exit and then two villains enter and begin to throw it between them. The audience becomes frightened out of their wits, for they have accepted that the chair is made of platin art glass and is worth 19 million dollars. This is the whole secret of theatre, you see. (Sjögren, 1968: 311)8

8 The situation described here was later dramatised in Fanny and Alexander, where little Fanny, representing the child as ideal spectator, interrupts the villain with her brusque “Don’t touch that chair!”

2.

William Shakespeare, King Lear

King Lear, Bradley (1963: 208f.) says, is possibly Shakespeare’s best play when read. When staged it is inferior to the other three great tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. The reason for this discrepancy between the play as read and as staged is that “the number of essential characters is so large, their actions and movements are so complicated, and events towards the close crowd on one another so thickly” that even “the reader’s attention […] is overstrained;” a cut stage version, he argues, will make the play even more unintelligible. Charles Marowitz, who was co-director in Peter Brook’s renowned 1962 production of King Lear, takes the contrary view; the play, he f inds, “is so organically conceived that one can cut out great chunks and still not impair its essence” (Williams, 1992: 20). B apparently agreed with Marowitz; his King Lear was cut with about one third. Rejecting the existing Swedish translations of the play, B commissioned Britt G. Hallqvist to provide him with “a playable, speakable and above all intelligible version,” as he writes in the theatre program (Shakespeare, 1984: 6); he also expresses his gratitude for the “robust and solid equipment” she had provided his team with in their “difficult expedition into the hard-topenetrate and mysterious continent called King Lear.” Hallqvist’s integral translation is reprinted in the program; changes in the performance are indicated in the text. It is not mentioned on which source text the translator has based her translation, but B’s somewhat ironical remark in the program on “brilliant commentators like Kenneth Muir“ suggests that it is Muir’s edition of King Lear in the renowned Arden Shakespeare that has formed the basis for the translation. King Lear, B summarised tongue-in-cheek during the rehearsal period, is actually “an ordinary story about a dominant pater familias who takes early retirement and divides the heritage between his children in the hope of binding them with constant gratitude and happiness, a daily guest who gives good advice and knows everything better, self-contentedly assured that he has secured board and lodging for the rest of his life. But the king is mistaken” (Dagens Nyheter Dec. 7, 1983). The tragedy consists of 5 acts and 26 scenes. B abstained from the act division and reduced the play to 21 scenes. Since the action was to take place on an empty stage, a stage representing our world, all place indications – “A room in King Lear’s palace,” “A heath,”etc. – were omitted. In the

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source text II.3,1 showing Edgar in “A wood,” is inserted between the scene in “Gloucester’s Castle,” where Kent is placed in the stocks, and the scene where Lear discovers him there. B combined these two scenes and placed the wood scene in its natural environment between the heath scenes III.2 and III.3. The controversy between Edgar and Oswald, ending in Oswald’s death, was deleted. Shakespeare’s Gentleman became a Scribe, his Officer a Physician. A play about good and evil rather than about good and evil characters,2 King Lear is set in a pre-Christian era. There are many references to higher powers. In V.3 Lear speaks of mankind as “God’s spies.”3 But Gloucester claims that “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods” (IV.1). Does this indicate that Shakespeare’s Lear is a monotheist, his Gloucester a polytheist? If so, his Lear is in this respect an exception. With B it was rather Gloucester who, through the director’s many omissions of “gods,” was an exception. A significant deletion was the elimination of Edmund’s failed attempt to withdraw his order to have Lear and Cordelia executed. This is the one sign in Shakespeare’s play that Edmund is not altogether evil. It was not, I think, that B did not grant Edmund this little sign of goodwill; the reason was rather that it comes too late to convince and it leads to nothing, since Lear is not saved by the withdrawal of Edmund’s order but by Lear’s own killing of his intended executioner. The scenographer, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss (1995: 48ff.), has informed us both about the stage and the costumes for the Lear production. The circular stage, representing the world or, in Lear’s words, “this stage of fools,” remained empty of ordinary properties throughout the performance and could in this sense recall Shakespeare’s Elizabethan stage. The proscenium frame was covered by black cloth, as was the ceiling above the blood-red cyclorama at the back of the stage. The stage was covered by a red carpet. At the front of it there was a sloping black floor with stairs, serving to eliminate the border between stage and auditorium. The same effect was reached by having the circular stage with its red cyclorama match the horse-shoe shape and colour of the auditorium. Red and black were the dominating colours, a combination we easily associate with the Nazi flag and regime. Clearly, director and scenographer had created a theatrum mundi in which 1 For the benefit of the reader references are to the act/scene division in Shakespeare’s King Lear (1978). 2 “The children are not children for nothing; to be the father of Goneril is to create a symbol of the evil brought forth from oneself” (Heilman, 1963: 34). 3 Bradley (1963: 226, note 2) points out that his use of “God” in singular at this point is unique in the play.

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the distinction between the characters and the audience was subordinated to the idea that we are all as human beings inhabitants of this same world. It was wholly in agreement with this idea that the characters remained on the stage throughout the performance – as we all stay on here until we die. Lear’s decision to have his realm divided between his three daughters was visualised by having a huge map spread out on the floor. To indicate his realm’s geographical nonexistence, it showed a mythic Rorschach picture. Lear stood and walked on it, thereby emphasising his position as absolute ruler of his kingdom; it was in this position he fittingly received his three potential heirs to the throne. In the beginning, Lear wore a yellow, embroidered imperial robe reaching to his feet and golden gloves. On his head he had a golden crown. An absolute Roi Soleil, declamatorily asserting his rights. 4 Later, reduced to the level of the common people and even to that of the lunatics, he wore – I quote from the costume list – “a gray poor man’s shirt with a low slung-rope around the middle. A black patinised poor man’s coat. Gray-coloured long pants.” His clothes showed his social decline from golden height to grey commonness. At the same time there was a touch of monk-like penitence in his greyness. Goneril – in the prompt copy described as “her father’s daughter [...], arrogant, dangerous, cold and not pretty” – wore a lilac-red, low-necked dress of worn velvet. Regan – in the prompt copy described as “contrasting with her sister; pretty, coquettish” – had a bright-red, low-necked brocade dress, indicating that she was younger than her sister. Both had their own courts, dressed in colours similar to themselves. When the two courts gathered opposite each other the nuances of red could be seen; when they were seated close to the red cyclorama their colours almost mingled with it. Cordelia who unlike her sisters had no court – a way of emphasising her independence – in the beginning wore a “rose-coloured crêpe-silk dress covered by gray chiffon” with black silk in cross-form in front, anticipating her suffering and eventual martyrdom. She had a grey cotton petticoat, grey low-heeled shoes and a grey velvet coat. The simplicity of Cordelia’s costume, agreeing with her honesty, formed a marked contrast to the glamorous costumes of her sisters. Albany and Cornwall wore costumes in colours reminiscent of those worn by their wives Goneril and Regan. Like Edmund they had big cod-pieces emphasising their sexual appetite. Gloucester and his sons Edgar and Edmund all wore black clothes, the good 4 Some reviewers found Lear’s diction a somewhat disturbing sign of old-fashioned acting. But Timm (2008: 541) convincingly argues that the diction served to emphasise “that the king belonged to a past era.”

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Edgar in lustreless cloth, the evil Edmund in shining cloth. Gloucester’s black gown – a sign of learnedness – contained both lustreless and shining parts. In the prompt copy Edmund is described in surprisingly respectful terms as someone who “takes responsibility for his attitude; new age; doesn’t blame the gods.” Edgar is described as “credulous, confused, near-sighted, kind, absent-minded; a Hamlet.” The Duke of Burgundy and the King of France were dressed in green-and-blue costumes of different shades to indicate their outsider status. Jugglers and musicians wore earth-green colours, put together like collages. The Fool shared their colour scheme except that the back of his trousers was mended with a red piece of cloth, “an ironical grimace at the red colours of the royalties.” The costumes of the equally tall, grey-uniformed soldiers were a hybrid between “medieval Japanese warriors (inspired by Kurosawa) and science fiction soldiers. The past and the future were connected” (Palmstierna-Weiss, 1995: 50ff.). While the spectators were still arriving and taking their seats, the performance opened with a twelve-minute ‘prologue,’ an addition by the director. Downstage, close to the audience, the backs of a row of soldiers with lowered lances in their hands formed a bodyguard around the King who was standing in the middle of the circular stage, his back turned to the audience. Facing him was a group of musicians – with flutes, drums, a lute – playing a solemn variation of the Fool’s ditty in III.2 with the lines He that has and a little tiny wit, […] Must make content with his fortunes fit.

It was to this tune that male and female dancers reverently performed to the King – who would soon show “little tiny wit” – the female dancers sometimes alone gracefully curtseying to him, their behaviour mimicking what he expected from his three daughters in return for his generosity toward them. As soon as the King had left, the music and dancing changed radically into popular self-entertainment: wild singing, dancing, hand-clapping, shouting, somersaults etc. It was a sequential contrast, indicating a gap in society anticipating Lear’s decline from royalty to beggar and recalling Shakespeare’s double audience: the nobility in their “Lords’ Rooms” versus the lower-class groundlings. Finally, a group of white-painted ‘clowns’ ran front-stage and looked straight at the audience as they sang the Fool’s ditty with its examples of how everything had become topsy-turvy in his kingdom:

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When usurers tell their gold i’th’field; And bawds and whores do churches build; Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion.

The ditty was a ‘Brechtian’ motto for the performance-to-come and pointed forward to the ending. The King’s abdication set the play in motion. Addressing Albany and Cornwall, the successors to the throne, Lear told them: “As a sign of your position, you may share / this crown between you.” He took off his crown, raised it above his head and held it in turn above the heads of Albany and Cornwall, both of them kneeling. He then placed the crown on the floor centrally downstage, where it was put in spotlight. As a visual image of power it remained there throughout the performance. The only one who dared touch it was the Fool who once (in III.6) discreetly touched it with his shoe. Was it to indicate the universal attraction of power? Was it to suggest Lear’s, his alter ego’s, regret at having abstained his power? Or was it in mockery of the crown as image of power? When this happened the Fool had already presented Lear with his fool’s cap. In IV.6, when Lear has clearly turned mad, he appears, it says in the text, “fantastically dressed with wild flowers.” B had him wear a long grey slip and a wreath of wild flowers on his head, each flower having a symbolic significance. The wreath was at once a substitute for the crown; a thing of nature instead of something man-made; a traditional way of celebrating Midsummer in Sweden; and above all a counterpart of the crown of thorns, the symbol of substitutive suffering; prominent in the wreath was a poppy, with its blood-red colour an allusion to the Passion of Christ (Cooper, 1978: 218). III.2, set on the heath, opened with a spotlight on the crown. Another spot slowly revealed Lear next to it, surrounded by darkness. His soliloquy in the source text reads: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’the world, Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once, That make ingrateful man.

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This difficult-to-grasp soliloquy was rendered in a shortened, extremely free rendering: Cursed be the day when I was born! Anguish pours over me like water. I have become a leaf driven by the wind – dust, dust and ashes, a dried straw! An abomination to those close to me, an object of ridicule have I become, dumped in darkness…

Shakespeare’s Lear at this point rages against mankind and prays for the annihilation of the world; he still feels “more sinned against than sinning.” B’s Lear, on the other hand, already filled with self-contempt and guiltfeelings, raged against himself. The Fool calls himself “Lear’s shadow,” and so he was in B’s version. In I.4 the Fool put his fool’s cap on Lear’s head, and in I.5 – the scene B liked the best in the whole play he wrote in his prompt copy – the near-identity of the two became explicit. When the scene opened the Fool entered eating an apple. The reason for this became clear when he warned Lear, who hoped to be treated quite differently by Regan than he had been by Goneril, that this would hardly be the case. By comparing Goneril with a wild apple and Regan with a garden apple, he recognised some difference between them but emphasised their basic similarity. That he was eating an apple also served to remind the audience of the apple of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2: 17), the eating of which was the Original Sin affecting all of us. The Fool and Lear are themselves like two different yet related ‘apples’: fool.... Sweet fool and bitter fool, You see them both here. One wears a motley dress. The other is sitting Points to lear. there. lear. Why do you call me a fool, fool? fool. All your other titles you’ve given away, but this one you were born with.

The ambiguity of ‘fool’ was concretised in this exchange between someone who was fearing for his own sanity and someone who professionally pretended to be crazy, between a near-fool and a would-be fool. At end of the

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scene, B had Lear lean his back against the Fool who caringly embraced him. The two formed a visual unity. When Lear later on the heath was surrounded by fools, the audience could experience them either as objective fools or as subjective specters of his insane mind. A striking innovation was the use of human beings as properties. Lear set the pattern when he offered his realm to his daughters sitting on a servant. Shortly after this Goneril and Regan were using male servants as chairs, a social as well as sexual suppression. Later both they and their husbands were sitting on human chairs, disguised by the women’s huge dresses but visible as kneeling bare-foot servants between the men’s trousered legs. When Kent was put in stocks, the stocks were formed by servants. Lear’s table was supported by three servants. Having conquered the French army, Edmund sat down on someone with bare feet, a servant or a prisoner. Servants formed the catafalque for the dead Cornwall. The social hierarchy could hardly have been more poignantly illustrated than through these visual symbols of power distribution. Another striking feature was the almost constant presence of background groups which in changing constellations formed a mute comment on the action among the main characters centre stage.5 The groups at times formed one homogeneous whole, at other times they split into two, as when the conflict between Goneril and Regan became apparent. They could turn toward or away from a character; this was how the soldiers changed their attitude to Lear in II.4. They could stand immobile when important statements were made by the main characters or they could keep moving, notably when scene shifts occurred. When Burgundy and Frankland were courting Cordelia they formed a row of loving couples. When Albany in I.4 seemed in control of his wife Goneril, three couples were seen behind them, the men, hand on sword, in front of the women. Shortly thereafter, when Goneril attacked Albany, the women in the background had moved in front of the men. In II.4 a row of women in the background, all in red, put one foot on male servants, all dressed in black, prostrate on the floor. The women indicated the growing dominance of Goneril and Regan, they too in red, not only toward their father but also toward their husbands. In II.4 where Lear has been rejected by Goneril, the lances of the three soldiers in the background were topped by crosses, an indication of Lear’s martyrdom. In V.2 a compact wall of soldiers, this time representing Lear’s French army, to the somber sound of kettle-drums moved forward; in front 5 Tord Bæckström in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning compared them to the chorus in old Greek drama, always present and serving as a sounding-board for the action.

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of them panic-stricken people fled down into the auditorium, transmitting the fear, as it were, to the audience. As in fairy-tales and morality plays, the characters in King Lear tend to be black and white, good or evil. The wickedness of the evil characters – Goneril, Regan, Cornwall and Edmund – takes the form of greed: for power, wealth and, easier to demonstrate in the theatre, for sex. In the source text the relationship between Goneril and her steward Oswald is not erotic. B added this aspect to it. At the end of I.3, Goneril orders Oswald to treat Lear and his retinue condescendingly and informs him that she will tell Regan to treat them in the same way. As she was doing this, B’s Goneril, secluded by an orange curtain held up by three of her ladies in waiting, let Oswald creep under her dress and suck her intimates. Always creeping to his superiors, he willingly obeyed. Apart from illustrating Goneril’s lasciviousness, the combination of words and action made her orgasm seem not only sexual but also hierarchical. Her seduction of Oswald – and unfaithfulness to her husband – prepared for her attempts later to seduce Edmund. When Edmund in II.1 lies when saying that Edgar has conspired with Lear’s retinue, Regan suspiciously assumes that they have plotted to murder Lear and waste his revenues. When saying this to Edmund, B’s Regan took an orange handkerchief from between her breasts and smilingly gave it to him. For this she received a telling smile in return. This erotic approach did not prevent her from caressing her husband’s cod-piece in the next scene when listening to Oswald’s complaint about Kent. In III.7 the outstretched hands of Goneril and Edmund met as Cornwall, wantonly embracing Regan, voiced his condemnation of Gloucester. IV.2 opened with Goneril and Edmund copulating rolling across the stage, Goneril on top. She then stood up and, with Oswald approaching, hypocritically curtseyed to Edmund and said: “Welcome here. I wonder why / my mild husband does not come to meet us.” A little later Shakespeare’s Goneril gives Edmund “a favour”; with B this was a necklace which she, both of them kneeling, hung around Edmund’s neck. In V.1 Edmund soliloquised downstage, facing the audience: I swore to love both sisters. Which of them shall I take? One? Both? Or neither? – I get neither if both remain alive. Looks at miniature portrait of Goneril on his necklace. Goneril goes mad from rage

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if I choose Takes up orange handkerchief. Regan. I shall hardly win the game Looks at portrait of Goneril. as long as her husband is alive. Looks at portrait and then at handkerchief, tears off necklace, holds it up, then drops it.

Necklace, portrait, and handkerchief, metonymies for Goneril and Regan, here came together. And while Edmund’s words left his choice unsettled, his final action – dropping the necklace – settled the matter. The most savage moment in the play is the blinding of Gloucester in III.7. Gloucester says that he has sent the King to Dover in order not to have Regan’s “cruel nails pluck out his poor old eyes.” Ironically, it is Gloucester’s own eyes that are soon being plucked – by Cornwall. B had Gloucester half-lie downstage centre. Taking his cue from Cornwall’s “Upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot” – a line deleted in the performance – B had Cornwall set one of his black leather boots to one of Gloucester’s eyes. The effect was obvious to the audience from Gloucester’s screaming from pain. Regan then moved close to Gloucester, looked at his face and said: “One eye mocks smilingly the other. / Take both!” The last was obviously addressed to Cornwall. But she was interrupted by the Servant who asked Cornwall to pardon Gloucester. In the source text Cornwall at this moment draws his sword and starts to fight with the Servant. Regan comes to his support, “takes a sword and runs at him [the servant] behind.” A little later it appears that Cornwell has been fatally wounded. B instead had Cornwall attempt to strangle the Servant, when Regan stabbed him in the back with a dagger. When the Servant, dying, tells Gloucester that he has “one eye left” to see how he, the Servant, had wounded Cornwall, Cornwall replies: “Lest it see more, prevent it.” This implies that he now puts out Gloucester’s second eye and thus fulfills his promise to set out both eyes. In the performance these lines were given to Regan and acted out as follows: regan. That he will never see, that I promise. Gouges out gloucester’s second eye with her dagger. Out, vile jelly! Dries off the blood on her breast and womb. Where is now your lustre?

B, it will be seen, had Regan take a more actively sadistic part in the blinding of Gloucester than was suggested by the text. Presumably B’s intention was

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to demonstrate that the seemingly softer Regan was in fact even more cruel than Goneril. The blinding of Gloucester showed Regan and Cornwall at their beastliest. In part of this scene she wore the mask of a leopard, he the mask of a tiger. But also the background characters wore masks of various beasts of prey. Each character wore the mask characterising him or her.6 The last Gloucester saw before he was blinded were the animal masks. Were they real or products of his imagination? The same question could be asked about the soldiers who did not wear masks but who, with their closed visors, seemed robot-like; inhuman. In her attempt to cure her father from his madness, Cordelia in IV.4, set in the French camp, meets the Doctor, with B significantly dressed in a monk-like garb. He tells her that Nature has many means to “close the eye of anguish.” The Doctor at this moment handed Cordelia a red flower, recalling the red poppy in Lear’s wreath. Cordelia blessed the flower as she tenderly held her hands around it. The next scene, in Gloucester’s castle, opens with Regan and Oswald. B unexpectedly let their dialogue take place as Regan, in front of an orange curtain, had one lady of waiting polish her nails,7 while another held up a hand-mirror to her. The situation was clearly designed as an artificial, selfish contrast to Cordelia’s loving care for her father in the former scene. When Regan asks Oswald if Edmund has spoken to Oswald’s master, that is, Albany, Oswald briefly says “No.” At this moment B’s Regan cried “ah!” and drew back a finger, obviously wounded by the lady in waiting polishing her nails. In a deeper sense it indicated that what wounded Regan was the implication that Edmund had turned to Goneril rather than to her husband. 8 With the wisdom of madness,9 Lear in IV.4 preaches to the blinded Gloucester: “When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.” B surrounded Lear, now dressed in a black gown covering a grey poor-man’s shirt, with a crowd of poor people corresponding to the fools Lear referred to, an emblematic picture of the spiritual poverty 6 For illustrations of the masks, see Olofgörs, 1995: 168. 7 As we have seen, Gloucester has earlier spoken of Regan’s “cruel nails.” And Lear has prophesied that “with her nails” Regan will flay Goneril’s “wolfish visage.” 8 The clue for Regan’s sudden gesture was presumably taken from Lear’s “Are these my hands? / Let’s see…yes, the pin pricks” (IV.7). But what for Regan was painful and inflicted by someone else, was for Lear self-inflicted to prove that he was alive. 9 Heilman (1963) heads one of his chapters “Reason in Madness,” another “Madness in Reason.” The former refers to Lear, the Fool, Edgar and Gloucester, the latter to Goneril, Regan, Cornwall and Edmund.

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of mankind. In contrast to the uniformity of the groups at the courts, the crowd surrounding Lear on the heath was highly individualised; in his prompt script B lists the members of the crowd as follows: Anders, a laughing man Peter, the couple with the child Margaret, stigmatized village saint Anna, Karin, carry cranium (obsessed by death) Kim, cripple, without leg Ralph, carries dying brother Borgund, flaggelant, rejected monk Skoglund, catatonic, insane Pierre, shaker (dementia tremens)

A blend of physical and mental sufferers, they form a representative piece of suffering mankind. With the combat between Edgar and Edmund toward the end of the play the suspense reaches a summit. When Edgar challenges his half-brother, his identity is unknown. Shakespeare indicates that his anonymity is safe-guarded by his being “armed,” and Edmund remarks that he looks “warlike”; normally, Rosenberg (1972: 304) points out, Edgar here “is in bright, unidentifiable armour, helmeted, plumed.” B instead had Edgar appear with his head completely covered, except for the eyes, with a black cap, in Sweden known as burglar’s hood. The honest man was in other words disguised as a criminal; his mask belied his face. The two combatants were identically dressed, altogether in black. Instead of the usual fight with swords, B made use of an ancient, possibly mythic type of fight called belt-wrestling in Sweden, in which the fighters joined their belts and tried to hit each other with their daggers.10 Departing from the tradition concerning belt-wrestling, B had the combatants’ eyes covered with black bandages, thereby providing a link with the black bandage of the eyeless Gloucester, their father. The fight was preceded by regular thumping of the soldier’s lances, culminating in Albany’s loud thump, marking that the fight could begin. B’s choice of belt-wrestling was not an endeavour to remind the audience of a national custom. Rather, by bringing the two identically dressed half-brothers – the legitimate and the illegitimate, the good and the bad – as closely together as possible in a fight of life and death, it was a way of 10 Sculptures representing belt-wrestling can be found in several places in Sweden, among others outside the National Gallery in Stockholm.

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suggesting that the two were, in a sense, parts of the same whole.11 Seen in this way, the fight was internalised. Good and evil became a struggle within one and the same human being: Everyman. When Edmund had been fatally hit, he asked his killer who he was. Edgar now unmasked himself. Goneril rushed up to the dying Edmund, kissed him, took his dagger, raised it, then moved upstage where a lady in waiting covered her with a huge mourning veil as a sign that she had taken her life. At the end, Albany asks Kent and Edgar to rule the realm. It is implied that two good men as rulers will compensate for the two bad rulers of the recent past. But Kent declines: “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; / My master calls me, I must not say no.” He obviously means a journey to the after-life, but it remains unclear whether he refers to his old age, implying that he probably has few years yet to live and is too old to co-rule the kingdom; or whether it is a euphemistic way of saying that he intends to shorten his life. B chose the latter. After the quoted lines his Kent slowly moved upstage where he covered himself with the symbolic mourning veil. The last lines of the play are given to Albany in the Quarto edition, to Edgar in the Folio edition. Both alternatives have had their defenders. Muir gives them to Edgar, but Hallqvist gives them to Albany.12 The lines read: The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most; we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

In B’s version the last line ended with a question: “Will years and burdens be fewer for us who are younger?” This question was soon answered in the negative. The dead Lear leaning over the dead Cordelia was carried away in a funeral procession formed by the common people, mournfully humming the same tune as the courtiers had been singing in the beginning. The crown was picked up by a servant who ran up with it to Albany and Edgar who were heading the procession. He kneeled and put the crown before them. At this moment Albany and Edgar instead of showing reconciliation – Shakespeare’s ending – drew 11 Cf. the female double face in Persona, consisting of two halves from the two struggling characters. 12 Muir (in Shakespeare, 1978: 206) argues that the words “we that are young,” in view of his age, are more natural in Edgar’s mouth than in Albany’s. But the actor doing B’s Albany was eight years younger than the actor doing Edgar. If Edgar is given the final speech, “we” may signal a royal plural (Rosenberg, 1972: 323).

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swords on each other. The suggestion was that the conflict between Goneril and Regan was to be repeated not only by these two men but endlessly. For “the struggles of life never end.” 13 But suddenly there was a big bang and complete darkness. When the lights came up the audience witnessed how the backdrop fell down and revealed the machinery behind it. It was at once an unmasking of theatre-as-illusionism14 and, more importantly, an answer to Kent’s question in V.8, “Is this the promis’d end,”15 in B’s version freely translated as: “Is this the end of the world?” King Lear, Kott (1966: 364) has remarked, “is a play about the disintegration of the world.” The production of King Lear was actually a kind of guest performance, since B was at the time still engaged at the Residenztheater in Munich. The production was on the whole enthusiastically received. But some critics declared that they were more impressed than moved by the performance. Guest performances were presented in Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Amsterdam, and Tampere.

13 This is the final line of Strindberg’s Erik XIV, staged by B in 1956, where dukes Charles and John come into conflict as soon as they have removed the King, their brother Erik, from power. 14 “We look into the dusty theatre machinery over the heads of actors who have just been playing King Lear at Dramaten,” Thomas Bredsdorff noted in his review in Politiken. 15 Kermode’s (2000: 184) comment is relevant: “The play demands that we think of its events in relation to the last judgment, the promised end itself, calling the conclusion an image of that horror” (V.3.264f.).

3.

August Strindberg, Miss Julie

When Miss Julie1 opened on Dramaten’s Small Stage, it was B’s second staging of the play. Four years earlier he had directed it as Julie at the Residenztheater in Munich with German actors and in a translation by Peter Weiss (Strindberg, 1984). In Munich, Julie was presented together with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House – here, as often in Germany, entitled Nora – and B’s own stage adaptation of his TV serial Scenes from a Marriage. The premiere took place on April 30, 1981. The three plays were presented in one and the same evening, Nora and Julie consecutively on the Main Stage of the Residenztheater, Scenes from a Marriage at the Theater am Marstall close by. The same ticket gave access to all three performances. The idea was to present what B called “three sisters” who all found themselves in genderdetermined crisis situations.2 B’s interpretation in Munich formed the basis for his Dramaten production seven years later. In the meantime, the play had been published in the scholarly edition August Strindbergs Samlade Verk, a reason why B wanted to stage the play anew and this time in Swedish. Another reason was naturally that he wished to direct this very Swedish play in his native language with Swedish actors in a Swedish theatre for a Swedish audience. In addition to the theatre program, the audience was provided with a separate edition of the preface and the play (Strindberg, 1985b). A few passages, it was shown here, had been cut; but the changes with regard to Kristin’s mime and the Ballet were not shown. The audience was confronted with an attractive and unusually powerful Kristin aged 40. Jean, aged 32, combined a boyish vitality with a need to embellish his life with invented stories. With her 43 years Julie was visibly marked by her past; this was especially noticeable when Jean called her a child “at twenty-five.”3 Partly brought up as a boy, she was rather masculine with her short, straight hair and her authoritarian manner. Jean’s social need to seduce a lady had its counterpart in Julie’s need to triumph over a 1 A richly illustrated comprehensive bilingual examination of the play and B’s 1988 staging of it is found in Törnqvist, 2012, also in www.missjulie.eu. 2 B had directed Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Residenztheater in 1978. The Julie performance is commented on and transcribed into English in Marker/Marker, 1983: 31-38, 101-47. For the reception in Munich, see Sjögren, 2002: 272ff. and Steene, 2005: 660ff. 3 Julie’s part was planned for Ewa Fröhling (born 1952), who a few years earlier had played Emily, the mother of Fanny and Alexander in the film of that name. But three weeks before the opening she resigned and was replaced by Marie Göranzon (Sjögren, 2002: 337).

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man. Jean’s attraction to a Julie much older than him combined with her masculinity played down the erotic element on his part and increased the impression that to him it was above all her social position that was attractive. Strindberg’s kitchen is oblique in relation to the footlights, thereby including, as it were, the foremost part of the audience in the kitchen (Rokem, 1986: 56). B’s kitchen was rectangular and ran parallel with the footlights. A huge beam on the ceiling indicated a suppressed kitchen level for the proletarians. The colouring was sparse: green for the tiny birches taken into the kitchen as a sign of Midsummer, brown for the copper lids and the water barrel, violet for the lilacs on the table. Grey was the dominant colour. The reason for this was not only that this colour fitted the lower class environment. Equally important was that the grey colour, here reproduced in no less than ten different shades, is a neutral colour, showing the rhythm of day and night from afternoon light to evening light to nocturnal darkness – never truly dark since it is Midsummer – to warm sunrise. The grey nuances absorb and transform the light. A cold shade results in a very cold, colourless room, whereas a warm light on grey makes the room come alive, lightens it up. These are effects which you cannot achieve with other colours. 4 The overruling lighting, measuring the discrepancy between playing time and played time, concerned the change from evening to morning light. At the same time the transition from warm light (sunset) to cold light (early morning) back to warm light (sunrise) accompanied the emotional development between Jean and Julie and the consolation the final sunrise meant for her. The oblique light worked shadows which especially toward the end seemed calamitous. The violet of the lilacs had its counterpart in Julie’s violet dress, cut like a young girl’s summer dress. As a liturgic colour, violet stands for penitence during the time of the Passion (Biedermann, 1991: 467). It is also the colour often worn by ageing women. The contrast between the somber colour of her dress and its life-affirming cut was indicative of Julie’s inner division. Jean wore in the beginning parts of his black servant’s livery, a social costume, whereas Kristin, unlike Strindberg’s cook but in agreement with 19th century reality, appeared in a dark dress, somewhat shorter than Julie’s and with shorter sleeves than hers, indications that her costume was a

4 Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, Some comments on the scenography of Miss Julie, 1987 (audiotaped interview with Egil Törnqvist).

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working dress. Similarly, Julie’s white slip, when occasionally glimpsed, contrasted with Kristin’s beige one, made of coarser material.5 The kitchen was immediately visible when the audience took their seats. This gave the spectators ample time to familiarise themselves with the stage picture which showed: A large, light-gray sousterrain kitchen. In the rear wall three small, violettinted windows, some opaque, some transparent. Behind the latter green bushes or trees can be glimpsed. In the middle of the rear wall two swinging glass doors, reached by a short flight of stairs. A gray-white cast-iron stove with an exhaust hood by the left wall, a kitchen sink behind it, a gray chair in front of it. A row of copper lids on the hood. To the right a simple table of light-gray pine with three chairs and three stools, all gray. In the right wall a door to jean’s room. Behind this, invisible for the spectators, a door to kristin’s room. The kitchen is decorated with birch branches, the leaves of which have just come out. To the left of the glass doors a speaking tube, a copper water barrel with a ladle, a cupboard hiding a slop-pail and, invisible for the spectator, a cupboard with porcelain and glassware. To the right of the glass doors an icebox and a washstand concealed by a folding screen. A large bell above the glass doors. A coffee pot on the stove. On the table a newspaper and a bowl with violet lilacs.

This was a realistic kitchen, not unlike those to be found in Swedish castles and manor houses around 1890.6 And it had a mood of Midsummer around it. At the same time the stage was very functional with its different acting areas: the exterior behind the windows, where prying people could be seen; the stove (Kristin’,s working place); the chair in front of it (Jean’s place) with the Count’s riding-boots in a dominant position downstage, indicative of his presence in the minds of the three characters; the table for moments of contact and equality; the hierarchical stairs, indicating social position or position of power; the empty area between stove and table for Julie’s moving around, a sign of her restlessness and feeling of being an outsider in the kitchen. When the performance began the stage was empty. There were naturalistic touches in the opening. The audience could sense the smell of kidney 5 For some of the costume sketches, see Olofgörs, 1995: 210f. and Palmstierna-Weiss, 2013: 355f. 6 Cf. Edqvist/Ehnmark in Strindberg 1976: 103f. Palmstierna-Weiss’ stage model is reproduced in Olofgörs 1995: 208.

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from Kristin’s frying-pan. And it could see how Jean, having danced wildly with Julie, as soon as he had entered the kitchen wiped the sweat from his forehead and rushed to the water barrel to quench his thirst. His picking up the newspaper from the table and glancing at it prepared for Jean’s later admission that it was newspaper reading that had provided him with the story about a suicide attempt in an “oat-bin” which he had earlier falsely ascribed to himself. Another directorial addition concerned Jean’s table prayer, an illustration of his purely formal Christianity, a show put on merely to satisfy his religious fiancée Kristin. Jean wore low boots. When compared to the Count’s high riding-boots, which Jean was supposed to polish, the low boots indicated not only Jean’s lower social position but also his need to identify himself with his master, his aspirations to make the low boots grow into boots or, as he himself says, “end up a count.” When the play opens Julie’s engagement has just been broken by her f iancé. This happened in the stable yard and Jean witnessed it. When describing this event Strindberg had originally written that the fiancé, when Julie for the third time wanted him to jump over her riding whip, “snatched the whip out of her hand and drew a weal across her left cheek”; in accordance with this, the following speech, by Kristin, ended with: “And that’s [added: why] she’s painting herself white now!” (Strindberg, 1964: 501). When B’s Jean related what happened in the stable yard, he swung the low boot he had just taken off in the air and put it against his left cheek. A costume piece was turned into a symbol of power. Under the headline “Three wounds for Julie...” B writes about this passage in the theatre program (Strindberg, 1985a: 2f.): We may speculate why Strindberg has omitted such important and informative words, words which provide the mood for the opening – Julie’s rage and fear – and moreover explain why she has not gone with her father to the relatives but has remained at home. When she appears out of doors she covers the burning mark of humiliation with makeup. This way it looks even worse. And in the dark corners of the barn the peasants are guffawing while Julie, painted white like a furious little clown, swirls round on the floor, first with the gamekeeper, then with Jean. You can always speculate. For my part I believe it happened like this. Siri von Essen, wife of the author and former actress, was promised the part at the world premiere in Copenhagen. She was dismayed when she realised that she was to apply a scar to her cheek and walk through the piece painted white. She would, in short, look peculiar. […] Siri is disappointed;

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she doesn’t want to show herself made up as a clown when at last she may appear on the stage again. August is consoling […] and deletes the lines.

This is a dubious explanation for Strindberg’s deletion of the scar motivated, I think, by B’s wish to exteriorise Julie’s split mind7 by providing her with an ugly scar8 which in the beginning is hidden by a thick layer of makeup. The white paint face would make her face approximate a skull, that is, exteriorise her urge for death, explicitly stated in her wish to “bury [her]self in the earth.” After the intercourse the makeup began to come off. “When Jean deflowers her and she is bleeding, the scar on her cheek starts to bleed, too. When Jean gives her this second ‘wound’ – her second physical humiliation at the hands of a man – it destroys her” (B in Marker/ Marker, 1983: 15). To see the connection between the scar and the bleeding the audience need to understand that it concerns deflowering – hence virginity on Julie’s part – rather than menstruation. But deflowering was never demonstrated whereas menstruation was indicated early in the play when Kristin euphemistically stated that Julie had “got her monthly now.” Drinking as a means of demonstrating (pretended) social status starts already when Kristin wants to serve Jean beer, whereas he finds wine a more suitable drink on festive occasions like Midsummer Eve. B’s Jean embroidered further on this when the valet played the part of wine expert with refined, aristocratic taste before Kristin; later the audience learnt– what Kristin undoubtedly already knew–that his expertness in this area stemmed from his time as sommelier at a hotel in Lucerne. Jean relapsed into his earlier professional role when he filled his own wine glass the way a waiter would, an ironical illustration of how difficult he found it to escape from this stage in his past. The class distance between the betrothed couple was indicated when Kristin handed Jean the wrong kind of glass, dried it off on her apron and then sipped her coffee from a saucer, peasant fashion. Julie’s handkerchief figures in several places in the text. When Jean, alluding to the brew Kristin is cooking on the stove and for which Julie has shown an interest, wonders if the ladies share secrets between them, Julie’s answer is short and rebuking: “flips him in the face with her handkerchief. Nosey!” But Jean, quick at repartee, parries: 7 Oliver (1995: 106) points out that the scar “visually establishes Julie’s vulnerability and provides further motivation for the fear and loathing of men she exhibits during the course of the play.” 8 The text never mentions directly what Julie looks like. Jean’s flattrering cannot be trusted. When Vogelweith (1972: 84) writes that she is “belle,” he devotes himself, undoubtedly influenced by stage Julies, to Hineininterpretierung.

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jean. Oh, what a lovely smell of violets! julie. coquettishly. Cheeky! So you know about perfumes, too!

What was meant as a rebuke is turned into an erotic invitation. In passing we are informed that the handkerchief is moistened with a violet-scented perfume. Julie’s handkerchief-flipping is an early example of the combination between power manifestation and erotic enticement characterising her in the early part of the play. When Jean later states that the “handkerchief was dirty even though it smelt of perfume,” his disappointment after the intercourse is obvious. When referring to the dirtiness of the handkerchief, B’s Jean slapped Julie in her face with it; this was at the same time a revenge for the flip she had earlier dealt him and a soft version of the wound the fiancé had given her with his riding crop. Kristin’s mime was shaped in quite another way than what is suggested in the text. It began with her drinking out of Jean’s half-empty wine glass, thereby making herself an accomplice in the stealing of the Count’s wine. She then took out a Midsummer wreath of wild flowers, placed the wreath on her head and smilingly looked in a table mirror, undoubtedly thinking of her husband-to-be. Perspiring after a day’s work, she went on washing her shoulders and breast with water from a bucket. In the immediate context this washing meant that she made herself ready for the dance Jean had promised her. Kristin’s mime is supposed to cover the time it takes for Jean and Julie to dance a schottische in the barn, in the performance replaced by a languishing waltz tune, more fitting as an intimate dance between two. To break the monotony a long mime easily gives rise to, Kristin’s mime was interrupted when Klara9 stole into the kitchen, picked a lump of sugar from the chimney-piece, put it in her mouth and dashingly waddling her hips approached Kristin, whispering something in her ear. Kristin reacted violently by whipping Klara away with a towel. What Klara whispered could be guessed; it no doubt concerned Julie’s wild dancing with Jean, something that would make Kristin jealous. When Julie orders Jean to kiss her shoe, the text informs us that he first “hesitates, but then boldly grasps her foot, which he kisses lightly.” For a modern recipient, used to more daring erotic behaviour, the situation seems somewhat curious. But we have to realise that Strindberg’s Julie according 9 Nameless in the performance, this housemaid is here named after the text’s Klara. There is an obvious connection between B‘s Klara and Kristin’s rival Viola in Alf Sjöbergs film Miss Julie.

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45

to the fashion at the time would keep her legs constantly hidden under a long dress. To the spectators around 1890 the shoe kiss, which implied that Julie pulled up her dress and showed part of her leg, was a daring erotic challenge. B’s handling of the shoe kiss agreed with his choice of retaining the period suggested in the text–somewhat at the cost of the audience’s willing suspension of their disbelief. In the seduction scene after the intercourse B chose, as we shall see, to distance himself from 19th century eroticism, thereby effectuating response instead of distance among the audience. When Julie admonishes Jean “Come outside now and pick me some lilac,” she has already breathed in the intoxicating scent of the lilacs on the table. We soon get the following: julie. I step down... jean. Don’t step down, Miss Julie, take my advice! No one will believe you did so freely; people will always say you fell down. julie. I’ve a higher opinion of people than you. Come and try.–Come!

Her last “Come!” is followed by the role direction “She gives him a long, steady look,” a look of sexual challenge. B had Julie at this moment come close to Jean. Since she had earlier left the door to his room open, her “Come!” could easily be understood as an invitation, not to pick lilacs but to enter his room, a more obvious invitation to seduction. When B’s Julie in a follow-up of the rise-fall theme told Jean about her longing to fall, she turned away from him as she gave voice to what seemed to be audible thinking. Both of them were looking down. Jean stood completely still as though he was the pillar in Julie’s dream of falling. Jean’s dream of rising, by contrast, was communicated vividly. He was looking and moving his hand upwards, dramatising his ambition to climb. Their way of presenting their dreams in this way illustrated their contrasting mentalities, her introvert, marked by death urge, his extrovert, marked by life affirmation. The handkerchief appears again in the text when Jean, on his way out into the park with Julie, says he has got a speck of dust in his eye. True or not, the situation brings the two physically closer, and Julie quickly makes use of it. B’s Julie abstained from the handkerchief and tried instead with her finger – more direct body contact – to remove the (supposed) speck of dust. Shortly after this Julie teases Jean for resembling the Joseph who did not let himself be seduced by Potiphar’s wife (Gen. 1: 39). He immediately contradicts her in action: “jean boldly forward and tries to take her round the waist to kiss her.” Although meant as a provocation, this boldness, moderate

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to a modern audience, seems rather a confirmation of her accusation. B updated Jean’s action by having him really kiss Julie. As a result her reaction when she “slaps him” was better motivated. Jean’s story about how he as a boy once stole into the Turkish pavilion, the Count’s outdoor toilet, relates to the main action of the play. Little Jean was forced to escape through the latrine hole when he was surprised by someone entering the toilet; for him, the trespasser, it was the only way out. Similarly, Sprinchorn (1966: 22f.) points out, is forced to escape from the kitchen into Jean’s room when the two are surprised by the Peasants entering the kitchen’s only exit. In either case the only normal escape route is blocked. As Jean tells Julie about his visit to the Turkish pavilion, he holds one of the lilacs from the bowl on the table under her nose. The smell of the lilac figuratively takes away the latrine stench of the story. In reality it excites Julie sexually; in the preface to the play Strindberg speaks of “the powerful aphrodisiac influence of the flowers.” B let Jean and Julie handle the lilacs in a way that foreshadowed their intercourse: Jean. […] Gradually I was overcome by a longing Holds the lilac close to julie’s half-open mouth. Once to experience the full delight of – Lets the lilac drop, stands up. enfin, I... I crept inside, saw, and marveled. But then someone is coming! julie picks up the lilac, smells it. There was only one way out for the gentry, but for me there was one more, and I had no choice but to take it.

A little later the lilac had been transformed from male member to riding weal when Jean, pointing with it toward the glass doors, alluded to the broken engagement in the stable yard. The Ballet, showing the Peasants dancing into the kitchen, became in B’s version a little play within the play. Instead of a whole crowd, the director settled for three men and three women. In the text we find the following socio-cultural triangles: The Count married to the Countess – the brick merchant, her lover. Jean betrothed to Kristin–Julie, his ‘mistress.’ Diana, Julie’s thoroughbred–the gatekeeper’s mutt, Diana’s ‘lover.’

Julie’s misalliance is preceded both by her mother’s unfaithfulness toward her husband with a man of a lower social class and by her thoroughbred’s copulation with a ‘proletarian’ dog. Jean’s unfaithfulness toward Kristin

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for the noble Julie, mirroring Julie’s mother’s social rise when she married the Count, is a step in the opposite direction. B filled out this socio-sexual pattern by differentiating between the text’s Peasants, inserting several levels between the cook and the animals: Johan, clerk Klara, housemaid Lars, coachman Sophie, scullery-maid Nils, cow-tender Anna, dairymaid

The six parts who were neither given names nor professions in the theatre program-–only the names of the actors and actresses appeared there–-gradually entered the kitchen so that the audience had time to sense the difference between them. Five of them sat down by the table, while the sixth, Nils, roaring drunk, fell down on the floor. The relation Johan-Sophie mirrored on a lower level than between Jean and Kristin, while Klara‘s jealousy of Kristin was a low-stationed echo of Kristin’s jealousy of Julie. Lars‘ relation to Anna signified both a social and a sexual misalliance. B’s celebrating and prying “chorus” formed not only a contrast to the main characters. In various ways it also visualised their actions and reactions. Thus Lars’ and Anna’s faked intercourse mocked what (they assumed) was happening in Jean’s room on the other side of the wall. Anna’s pregnancy foreshadowed Jean’s and Julie’s fear of “the consequences” of their intercourse. And Nils’ vomiting anticipated Julie’s after the intercourse. The second stanza of the Peasants’ lampoon was omitted. In the remaining two the obscenity which, as Strindberg remarks in the preface, is merely implicit, was marked by a slow, mocking manner of singing. The line “One was wet around her foot”–-in the performance “the foot” was replaced by “the leg”-–was indicated kinetically when the drunken Nils put his leg in the water barrel and, later, when Julie after the intercourse rubbed Jean’s sperm from her leg. The Midsummer wreath that Kristin had earlier tried on her head–-as though it was a bridal crown–-now adorned the sluttish Anna’s head. In combination with the lampoon, “The bridal wreath I’ll give to you, […] But to another I’ll be true,” it underlined the theme of unfaithfulness. B’s interlude clarified the Peasants’ lack of respect for their masters and the inclination of the lower classes to steal on the sly from their superiors–-as do Jean and Kristin. As Jean had earlier provided himself with the Count’s burgundy, so now a bottle of aquavit, discovered behind the folding screen,

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was emptied by the already drunken crowd. The interlude, in other words, indicated that the eroticism and drunkenness of the two main characters had their counterpart among the common people. The folksy intermezzo seemed to confirm Jean’s leveling statement that “at bottom there isn’t such a big difference as one would think between people and people.” Unlike Strindberg, B had Kristin enter the kitchen, woken up by the noise of the Peasants, while they were still carousing there. But soon the intruders were forced to leave the room, one after the other, driven out by Kristin’s sheer glance. What had begun with mocking giggling ended with humble sobbing. The last to give way was Klara, the leader of the group and Kristin’s rival. On her way out of the kitchen she made a crude out-and-in movement with her fingers suggesting copulation. In this way B’s Kristin was informed, long before Strindberg’s, about what was happening in Jean’s room. A fallen woman after the degrading intercourse, Jean accuses Julie of having a dirty face. B made her wash herself in the very bucket Kristin had earlier used to wash off her very real sweat of labour. Julie’s post-coital dirt was figurative, recalling Jean’s dirty face after he had escaped through the latrine hole. When Jean’s sexual urge is again aroused, his flattering words and gentlemanly behaviour serve to facilitate his seduction of Julie. We are witnessing a piece of role playing. When Julie finally tears herself loose from him, she does so because she senses his hypocrisy. In B’s version Jean’s flattering of Julie was left intact, but his behaviour strongly deviated from his gentlemanly behaviour in the text’s role directions. In the performance he first caressed Julie’s breast, then kissed her neck and her breast, then put his hand underneath her dress, and finally bent her backwards and straddled her. There was an absurd discrepancy between his romantic flow of words and his crude actions, determined by his sexual excitement. He said that he could not be satisfied to be a mere creature to Julie but behaved as though he was precisely that. Similarly, Julie’s hope that love would be possible between them was coloured by her sexual heat. The text describes a man attracted to a woman who can satisfy both his sexual urge and his careerism, and a woman who seeks confirmation of love from her partner as a consolation for their recent coupling. The performance more grotesquely showed how their physical behaviour, governed by sexuality, contradicted their words. What the audience witnessed was a hypocritical variation – since human beings, unlike animals, have the power of language – of the copulation between Diana and the gatekeeper’s mutt. When Julie asks Jean if he knows “what a man owes a woman he’s dishonored”–-hereby indicating that it is he who has taken the sexual

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initiative–-he rejects her implicit reproach by pretending to understand her literally: jean opening his purse and throwing a silver coin on the table. Here you are! I don’t want to be indebted!

Jean has earlier compared Julie’s sexual behaviour with that of “fallen women.” Now he turns her into a prostitute–and himself into a buyer of sex. B’s Jean put one coin on the table, then one more; a third coin in his hand was, after some hesitation, put back in his purse. His hesitation as to how much the intercourse could be worth 10 signified a strengthening of the text’s cynical provocation. While Julie provides herself with travel money up above in the Count’s apartment Jean, now alone in the kitchen, “takes out a notebook and a pen; does sums aloud now and then.” Presumably he is calculating the cost of the journey to Lucerne. Returning with the travel money, B’s Julie put a pack of hundred crown notes on the table. Jean looked fascinated at them, as if he was hypnotised by them, and began to count them. His counting continued while Julie – now standing in her long white travel dress a little away from him faced the audience, as she was dreaming aloud of “childhood memories of Midsummer days.” Rational concern for the future versus nostalgic immersion in the past–-an echo of the antithetical dreams – were mirrored in their contrasting occupations. The money stolen from Julie’s father is needed for the escape to Switzerland the two are planning. There, Jean persuades Julie, they can begin a new life. But when Julie wants to bring her beloved greenfinch Serine with them, he protests and brutally beheads the bird. In the performance the beheading of the greenfinch was naturally faked, done out of sight of the audience. While the text’s Julie “turns away” when it happens, there was no need for B’s Julie to do so, for the slaughtering in the background was invisible to her who at this moment was downstage in a frontal position. More important than Jean’s slaughtering of the bird was Julie’s visible reaction to it. She held her lifted arms so that her position expressed both desperation and protection from the mortal blow; in addition the spectator’s glance was directed to her neck which was soon to be cut by her suicidal razor.

10 The device was repeated in B’s production of A Doll’s House three years later. It then concerned Torvald Helmer’s portioning out pin money to his wife Nora. Here too the idea of prostitution was evoked, this time within the marriage.

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One of the most enigmatic passages in the play concerns Julie’s atavistic thirst for blood after Jean’s beheading of the greenfinch. About the man she had just had intercourse with she now says: “I do believe I could drink from your skull, I’d like to paddle my feet in your breast, and I could eat your whole heart roasted!” Julie’s immense hatred of Jean after the killing of little Serine, her alter ego, here seems to break forth untrammeled. Or do we witness a regression to a more archaic stage marked by open fight between the sexes? Whichever way we interpret this passage, there is a risk that its grotesqueness appears comical to a present-day audience. With B, instead of being an outburst of hatred, it became paradoxically a declaration of love. Julie said her man-devouring words with great tenderness as she, standing behind the seated Jean, caressed his shoulders and back. The split within Julie – who both loved and hated her own father – was markedly visualised.11 Nowhere in the performance was the discrepancy between verbal language and body language greater than at this moment.12 The ending was done as follows: jean in his black livery on the chair by the stove, sobbing. I believe if his lordship came down now and ordered me to cut my throat, I’d do it on the spot. julie. Then let’s pretend you’re him, and I’m you. You acted so well just now, when you went down on your knees. Then you were the nobleman. Have you never been to the theatre and seen a hypnotist? He says to his subject, “Take this broom!”, and he takes it. He says, “Sweep!”, and it sweeps. jean sobbing. But then the subject has to be asleep. julie. I’m already asleep. Whispers. I’m already asleep.

The last speech was spoken by Julie with a firm voice and open eyes; the impression was not at all that she was asleep, only that she wanted Jean to believe this, so that he could continue his hypnosis. In this way Julie’s 11 A source of inspiration was possibly Per Olov Enquist’s drama The Night of the Tribades (1975), in which Strindberg’s one-act play The Stronger is being rehearsed. Mrs X’s hateful outburst against Miss Y is here acted as a declaration of love between the two women– against the intentions of the author who is present. Their purpose is to marginalise and even exclude the male (author). 12 This way of acting against the text was present in Enquist’s Copenhagen performance of Miss Julie, less than three months before B’s production of the play in Stockholm, when at one point Jean stood close to the seated Julie who leaned her head against his loin. Slowly rocking back and forth, their body language contradicted their hateful words (Bredsdorff, 1986: 96).

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strength was indicated. The following part of the hypnosis sequence, in which Julie ecstatically experiences Jean as an iron stove, was deleted. The sequence continued: jean up to julie, fetches a mirror. Standing behind her he holds it in front of her to show her how to hold the razor. Go now out to the barn. Whispers in her ear. julie. Thank you. Now I’m going to rest. But just tell me that the first may also receive the gift of grace. Tell me that, even if you don’t believe it. jean. The first? No, no, no, I can’t do that! Up to the chair by the stove, grabs the boots. But wait, Miss Julie, now I know. You’re no longer among the first, you’re among the last. julie. That’s true. I’m among the very last. I am the last. jean turns his face away from her as she holds the razor against her neck. After a while she lowers the mirror and sits down by the table. I can’t go. Tell me once more that I must go! jean. No, I can’t do that. I can’t! julie. And the first shall be the last. jean his face turned away, sobbing. Don’t think, don’t think! You’re taking all my strength from me julie’s head lowers. making me a coward. She gradually shrinks. He suddenly looks at the bell by the glass doors. I thought the bell moved. Shall we put paper into it? To be so afraid of a bell. But it is not just a bell. Someone is sitting behind it. A hand sets it in motion. Something else sets the hand in motion. Just cover your ears, cover your ears! Then he rings even louder! Rings, rings until you answer. Then it’s too late! And then the police comes... Two loud rings of the bell. julie straightens herself up. Fiddle music in the distance. julie gets up from the chair by the table. jean rushes out left, returns with a lot of banknotes which he nervously lets fall on the floor, gathers them together and stuffs them into julie’s pocket. It’s horrible but there is no other end. In bent servile position. Go. julie slowly ascends the stairs, turns around, opens one of the glass doors and backs out. As soon as she is gone jean begins to sob. When two loud rings of the bell are again heard, he gets up, takes up a pocket mirror and combs his hair. He picks up the bird-cage and hastens out left with it. He returns to take the small copper coffee pot from the stove, pours coffee from it into a silver pot. Picks up the Count’s riding boots, puts them under his arm. Takes up the silver tray with the silver pot, clicks his heels together, and marches out left. Blackout..

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As appears from this transcription, B in addition to Strindberg’s role directions made an effective use of mirrors in the ending. The man in black was seen closely behind the woman whose white dress “was reminiscent of a shroud” (Palmstierna-Weiss, 2013: 355). In their costuming and with their arms in virtually identical positions they were, in accordance with the marriage service, no longer two but one.13 Instead of making Julie imagine that the razor is a broom, as Strindberg has it, B let Jean hand her the mirror and instruct her how to apply the killing cut. For Julie the mirror at this moment signified a confrontation with her own self on the threshold of death, an “as through a glass darkly” and “face to face” position14 starkly contrasting with Jean’s turned-away head, his bodily denial that he had anything to do with her mortal gesture. When Jean, in B’s added epilogue, took up his pocket mirror to make himself presentable to the Count, his hiding behind a social persona glaringly contrasted with Julie’s brave self-confrontation. His behaviour at this moment was completely in line with his attempts to disguise his share in Julie’s theft of the Count’s money when he crammed the banknotes in her pocket; his removal of the bird-cage when they planned their escape; and his suggestion that she commit suicide in the barn, far away from Jean’s domain. To B it was important that Julie’s decision to die should be seen as a manifestation of strength. This is implied already in the text where it is she who orders Jean to order her “to go” out to the barn to kill herself. By deleting most of the hypnosis sequence, B could further tip the balance of strength between Jean and Julie to her advantage. “From the moment she accepts death, she is the stronger,” B declared in an interview given shortly before the premiere. To this end Julie’s behaviour was substantiated in various ways. Instead of letting Jean hand her the razor, as the text has it, B let Julie pick it up herself. When the hypnosis passage was largely replaced by the mirror sequence, it served to indicate that Julie consciously took her decision. And when the director stressed Jean’s cowardliness, not least by having him say his final “Go” not as a command but servilely, Jean’s active share in her voluntary death was weakened. Although Jean has the last line in the play, the attention in Strindberg’s ending is directed toward Julie and her final exit. A director can choose to 13 Rosmer’s and Rebekka’s marriage-in-death at the end of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm may have been a source of inspiration. However, B’s couple at this point seemed a very ironical variant of Ibsen’s which, united by love, choose to die together. B planned to direct Ibsen’s play for the Swedish radio in 2004 but withdrew. 14 Both the biblical source (1 Cor. 13:12) and B’s film titles derived from it were here relevant.

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balance the two main characters and the alternatives they represent and let the ending be a logical follow-up of their earlier demonstrated antithetical dreams. This is what B did when he supplemented Strindberg’s ending with a short epilogue, Jean’s concluding mime.15 Two contrasting types – the inflexible versus the pliable, the idealist versus the realist – were pitted against one another. Jean survived by returning to his earlier role. Julie, unable or unwilling to do so, chose death. Did B make Julie’s suicide credible? The critics were divided on this matter. By setting the play in the fictive period suggested by the author, he could at least do justice to the author’s idea in the preface that Julie “cannot live without honor.” As important as to motivate Julie’s decision it was to indicate that it was her decision. What was accentuated in B’s ending was the diametrically opposed attitudes to life of the two main characters. The critics were mostly very favourable. The production went on tour to fourteen different places in Sweden. There were guest performances in Madrid, Vasa, Reykjavik, Quebec, Spoleto, Edinburgh, Belgrade, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Moscow and New York, in New York with another actress (Lena Olin) in the title role.

15 B was not the first who provided the play with such an epilogue. In a TV version 1972, based on a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Place in London the year before, the play was concluded, much as B’s, by Jean’s pouring coffee into the Count’s coffee pot; with his boots under his arm he left the kitchen.

4. August Strindberg, A Dream Play With his pioneering A Dream Play Strindberg set the tone for the drama to come. The play shows how the Daughter of Indra, the Indian god, visits the earth in order to find out whether the complaints of humanity are justified. As little Agnes, the daughter of a glazier, she takes human form. Standing before the beautiful “growing castle,” representing earthly life, she is amazed at its beauty. In a series of scenes, she meets various representatives of mankind, all of them suffering, yet hoping for a change for the better. Many of them appear in the theatre corridor, like the world itself a place of illusion. Three characters are prominent in the play: the Officer who endlessly keeps waiting in the corridor for his beloved Victoria, an opera singer; the Lawyer who tries to help those who suffer injustices; and the Poet who seeks to be in touch with higher, spiritual values. Married to the Lawyer, the Daughter gives birth to a child. Feeling imprisoned with a husband who does not share her needs, she escapes with the Poet, first to Foulstrand, an earthly hell, then to Fairhaven – only to discover that suffering applies there too. Back in the theatre corridor she witnesses how the four deans of the university manage to get the door that is said to hide the riddle of the world, opened – only to discover that there is nothing behind it. Back in front of the growing castle, she witnesses how a number of the characters she has earlier met sacrifice their most treasured properties to the fire. Before entering the castle, now burning, to return to her heavenly Father, she promises mankind to “bear their complaints to the throne.” Loosely imitating the form of a dream to evoke the feeling that life is a dream, the play lacks the traditional division of acts and scenes;1 also, there is no list of dramatis personae. When the play was first published it lacked the Prologue that was probably added shortly before the world premiere in 1907. Since then the Prologue has sometimes been included, sometimes excluded in performances. Quigley (1985: 117f.) has convincingly argued that the Prologue “functions as part of an explanatory frame for the action of the play, a means of orientating the audience towards the subsequent action,” and that the awareness “of the world beyond Earth, links the audience with the only character who shares this double perspective, […] the Daughter of Indra.” Inclusion of the Prologue means that the play is given a logical circle frame in imitatio Christi: when

1

In Strindberg’s notes, however, the play is divided into 3 acts and 14 scenes.

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it opens we witness the Daughter leaving her celestial domicile to begin her earthly existence; when it closes she returns to her heavenly origin. Reputedly the daughter of an Indian god,2 Agnes is an agnus dei, a female Jesus. Being a divine creature, she is by definition different from all the other characters in the play. This is indicated not least by the alienating third-person form of her recurrent Det är synd om människorna, a phrase meaning “Human beings are to be pitied” or – since it sounds very natural and inconspicuous in Swedish – simply “Poor humanity!” The phrase could also be taken to mean: “Human beings are rooted in sin.” The former, more obvious, meaning implies that mankind is treated unjustly, by Indra/God. The second, more disguised, meaning indicates that mankind is itself responsible for its situation. Both meanings are implied in the Prologue where Indra’s negative view of humanity clashes with the Daughter’s defence of it: “You judge them too harshly, Father.” And it is contained much later in the Daughter’s question to Indra on behalf of humanity: “Is the fault theirs / Or Yours?” A kind of answer is given when she reveals to the Poet how “in the dawn of time […] Brahma, the divine primal force, allowed Maya, the world mother, to seduce him […] This contact between the divine element and the earthly element was heaven’s fall from grace.” The world, life, and humanity are, in other words, the result of a celestial fall, preceding the human fall in the Garden of Eden that is significantly not mentioned in the play, an indication that the balance is tipped in support of mankind’s complaint about a wry world order. On the other hand, when confronted with an extreme form of social injustice the Daughter defends the situation as it is: “Has it never occurred to anyone that there might be some hidden reason why things are the way they are?” At the end the Daughter, ready to return to her heavenly Father, tells “the wall of human faces, questioning, sorrowing, despairing” that she leaves behind on earth: Farewell! Tell your brothers and sisters I shall remember them, Where I now go, and their lament I shall bear in your name to the throne.

She is not taking sides. It is strictly in the name of humanity, not in her own, that she is simply forwarding a message. The question of guilt remains unsolved.

2

Indra does not in fact have a daughter. Strindberg here took liberties with Indian mythology.

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It is a common misconception that in A Dream Play Strindberg is trying to imitate a nocturnal dream3 – a formal interest – whereas, as mentioned earlier, his striving was rather to imitate life, an ideological concern. To do this he needed the fluid and often bizarre nature of the dream. Thus in the play various properties take on a new look when they become part of a new setting. Apart from being dreamy ‘dissolves,’ these transformations serve to evoke a feeling that we cannot trust our senses and that human understanding is limited. This is explicitly demonstrated in the three visions of the second Cave scene, where the Poet imagines that he sees a ship, then decides that it is a house or a tower until, finally, he discovers that it is a church. Gradually, his eyesight improves. Similarly, Strindberg’s arrangement of scenery and properties time and again remind us that our imperfect eyesight gradually improves, as when we discover that the earthly paradise called Fairhaven is not Paradise; when we discover that the four-leaf clover – representing luck and worldly success – that is found in the mysterious door in the theatre corridor, when appearing in the door leading to the sacristy in the church scene, is actually a cross, that is, the symbol of suffering and sacrificial love; or when we realise that the Officer’s bouquet of red roses, when withered, becomes a punishing rod and eventually turns into the Lawyer’s “crown of thorns.” Vicarious suffering is the meaning of life. In A Dream Play human life is described as a constant oscillation between illusion and disillusion. What the characters hope for never comes true the way they had hoped. The only hope that finally remains is the hope that death means an awakening to a better existence. Will this hope come true? Which theme could be more universal? Olof Molander, who was the leading Strindberg director in Sweden for decades, staged A Dream Play no less than seven times. As a converted Catholic he was well attuned to Strindberg’s post-Inferno plays with their belief in a higher Power ruling man’s life. B admired Molander’s Strindberg productions. But since he did not share Molander’s faith and felt the need to set himself off against his great predecessor, his four productions of A Dream Play turned out to be rather different from Molander’s. In Strindberg’s To Damascus the Stranger remarks: “there are moments when I doubt that life has any more reality than my writing.” This was a key to B’s four productions of A Dream Play, where Indra gradually disappeared and was replaced by another creator, the writer of the play.

3 Freud’s Traumdeutung (1899) is often mentioned in this connection. But Strindberg was not familiar with Freud’s work.

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In his four productions, B usually abstained from the Prologue arguing that “it destroys the strange, bizarre self-evidence of the play opening” (Röster i Radio, No. 17, 1963). By opening the play with little Agnes in front of the growing castle B let his audience remain ignorant of Agnes’ divine status until the dialogue revealed that she was “the god Indra’s daughter.” No longer privileged recipients, the audience was on a par with the characters in the play. B’s first production of the play, in 1963, was made for television. With its twenty-eight scenes and thirty-six actors and actresses, it was the largest production undertaken to date by Swedish television. The production opened with the ‘Author’s Note’ to the play superimposed on a cloud that soon dissolved into a close-up of Strindberg’s face. Substituting Strindberg for Indra and abstaining from the Prologue in Heaven, B immediately made it clear that his performance was a fantasy on the part of the author, whose link with the Poet in the play was clarified at the end when the Poet entered a cloud which dissolved into a close-up of Strindberg’s face. The idea that the author is the dreamer of the play returned in B’s first stage production of the play at Dramaten in 1970, but with a variation. The Poet was split into two characters: the Bard, representing the author’s dreamed or idealised image of himself or of his public image, and the Poet, his ordinary self. Similarly, and more in line with Strindberg’s idea, Indra’s Daughter was split into two: the ideal Daughter and the earthly Agnes. The Bard and the Daughter appeared briefly, shortly after the opening, where they were posing like actors to an audience applauding them. In this production, one critic commented, the play was “no longer about metaphysics but about theatre” (Per Erik Wahlund in Kvällsposten), so much so that the lighting equipment of the stage was fully visible. In the grey light down on earth the characters gathered around the Poet like shadows, then began a treadmill walk around the empty stage. B’s adaptation, published in English (Strindberg, 1971), retained the fifteen scenes that can be distilled out of the source text, but a number of references to oriental religion, which are confusing to a modern westerner, were omitted and the dialogue was condensed and rearranged. The Poet, present on stage throughout, was constantly eavesdropping on his characters, indicating that he was not only the creator of the text, but also the shaper of the performance. In B’s reduced version there was no burning castle at the end. The altar, not prescribed by Strindberg but usually figuring in stage productions, was replaced by the Poet’s table, where the characters sacrificed their attributes; that is, took leave of their roles in token of the fact that they were merely products of the Poet’s imagination.

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B’s third production of A Dream Play, in 1977, signified his debut as director at the Residenztheater in Munich. The approach was similar to the one in 1970. 4 Again, the play was presented as a product of the imagination of the Poet seated at his desk. The realistic elements were emphasised at the cost of the imagery of Strindberg’s text. Indra’s Daughter descended from the ruin of a castle to the Poet surrounded by the characters of the play, emanations of his imagination. The growing castle was assumed to be placed in the auditorium and was consequently invisible. Dissatisfied with his three productions of A Dream Play, B once more, in 1986, tried his hand at Strindberg’s seminal drama: This time I wanted to play the text with no changes or deletions, just as the writer had written it. My intention was also to translate the very complicated stage directions into technically possible and beautiful solutions. […] To achieve space and intimacy, we decided to remove four rows of seats and extend the stage by five meters. In that way, we obtained an outer room and an inner room. The outer room, nearest to the audience, was to be the Poet’s domain with his desk by a multi-coloured art-nouveau window, the palm with its coloured lights, the bookcase with its secret door. To the right of the stage was a heap of rubbish dominated by a large but damaged crucifix and the mysterious pantry door. In the corner, as if buried in dusty junk, ‘Ugly Edit’ sat at her piano (B, 1989: 36f.).

As in B’s earlier versions, Strindberg’s parable about human suffering was minimised to the Poet’s vision of this suffering. Yet shared by the audience, his vision became objectified and universalised. By omitting the Prologue, B abstained from the play’s metaphysical assumption and credo. Rather than describing the situation on earth, the play became a description of how the Poet experienced this situation, or even of how his world consisted of his own characters, a solitary situation. The omission of the play’s religious Prologue undoubtedly made B’s version more acceptable to the secularised Swedish audience. The inspiration for this approach was apparently on the one hand Strindberg’s subjectivism in his post-Inferno period, notably in his To Damascus, staged by B in 1974, on the other Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, staged by B in 1953 and 1967. Both works are characterised by an obliteration of the border line between illusion and reality.

4

For a detailed comparison between the two productions, see Müller 1980.

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B’s intention to stage A Dream Play “just as the writer had written it” was not fulfilled. A substantial amount of the text was deleted. Disliking the elements of oriental philosophy in the play (Timm, 2008: 543), B omitted the Daughter’s reference to the world as “a faulty copy” of the original while, somewhat inconsistently, he retained her Indian account of the origin of the world. References to Haroun the Just and the Flying Dutchman were cut, presumably because they were regarded as sophisticated digressions. The Poet’s central role was strengthened by having both the Officer and the Lawyer abstain some of their lines to him. Each of Strindberg’s fifteen scenes opens with extensive stage directions, usually of symbolic significance (Törnqvist, 2011:144-158). These were virtually all ignored by B. Very important – and most innovative – is the opening of the “flower-bud resembling a crown” on the roof of the growing castle, which at the end of the play “bursts open into a giant chrysanthemum.” As these stage directions indicate, the whole play takes place within the time span from bud to flower. In the production script the play is divided into the following twelve scenes: The apartment – The growing castle The Officer’s prison cell The childhood home The theatre corridor The Lawyer’s office The degree ceremony The [Lawyer’s] room Foulstrand Fairhaven Fingal’s cave The theatre corridor The apartment – The growing castle

The localities could all be found in Strindberg’s text with one exception: the apartment, the domicile of the Poet, the human creator-experiencer of the play. As with Strindberg, the composition was circular. But instead of a movement from heaven to earth, and back to heaven, Strindberg’s Christ-like pattern, B’s development was horizontal, immanent, beginning and ending with the Poet sitting at his desk – as if time had stood still. The unity of the play was formed by the fact that everything emanated from a single source, the Poet’s mind. By allowing the audience to share his mind, his – man’s – normal mental isolation was transcended.

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Like the Poet, Ugly Edith, to the right – the part immensely expanded from the Foulstrand scene – remained on the stage throughout the performance. Sitting at the piano she was responsible for the many musical fragments: Bach’s Toccata in d minor, Chopin’s Funeral March, bits from The Swan Lake, a waltz, a Kyrie, etc. In this way the whole performance was framed, as it were, by words and music. Indra’s Daughter/Agnes was this time split into three characters of different age: the little girl, the middle-aged mother, the ageing woman. The stages in her life on earth became in this way more pronounced. Presumably B hereby wished to emphasise how age-bound our view of life is, perhaps also increase the sense of recognition on the elderly part of the audience that always is in the majority at Dramaten. Strindberg is capricious and on the whole negligent with regard to the outward appearance of the characters in A Dream Play. This is true even of the central figure. Only from the fact that she is the daughter of an Indian god may we infer that she looks oriental;5 in that respect B’s dark Daughter was not inauthentic. As for her costume, theatre tradition has favoured white, black or grey long dresses, suggesting divinity, mournfulness or earth-boundness (Törnqvist, 1988: 281ff.). In his fourth production, B’s Daughter wore a long, dark-red dress, presumably indicating her compassion for humanity, later covered with the Doorkeeper’s brown penitentiary shawl, where “thirty years of anguish […] are hidden”; when the Daughter had washed the shawl, it had significantly turned white. Another prominent costume was the Officer’s elegant green frock coat. The Billposter has longed all his life for a green fishing chest, but when he gets it, he is disappointed because it is not quite the green colour he had expected, not “that green,” an expression that has become proverbial in Sweden. His longing, followed by disappointment, shared by all the characters, is inveterately human. More explicitly than anyone else, the Officer, who keeps waiting endlessly for his Victoria, incarnates this hope; that is why B had him wear a green costume. The performance opened with a single piano note, in C major. At the end it petered out on the same desolate note. Between these a variety of notes – harmonious and disharmonious, secular and religious – were heard. Human life with its lonely beginning and lonely ending and variety in between seemed imitated in this musical structure.

5 This was the case with the first actress who played the part, Strindberg’s ex-wife Harriet Bosse. “You are from Java,” he used to tell her.

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As in 1970, B had chosen the following lines by Indra’s Daughter, reproduced on the opening page of the theatre program, as a motto for his production: The earth is not clean. Life is not good. Men are not evil, Nor are they good. They live as they can, One day at a time. Sons of dust in dust they wander, Born of dust To dust they return.

The performance opened in darkness with a male voice reading these lines. Was it the voice of Indra speaking from the high? When the lights came up it appeared that the words were those of the Poet, seated at his writing-desk. The lines, in other words, were not those of a divine character but of a human being, at once singular and representative. The immanent perspective had been established. The prompt script gives a good idea of the opening: The Poet is sitting at his desk. Lamp. Evening light. In the inner room windows can be glimpsed. The clock is ticking. Ugly Edith is sitting to the right, tuning the square piano. The Glazier shows up by the Jugend door and starts repairing a window. Knocks carefully. The Daughter (a little girl) appears by the desk and makes magic gestures. […] Transformation. Light. Colours. Arpeggio. Joy. The Daughter happy!

A little later the Daughter, seen in the opening of the “magic door,” stated that “The castle is growing....,” whereupon she ran inside. Meanwhile the Poet, at his desk, was looking through his papers. The simultaneity indicated that the Daughter was a product of his imagination.6 The growing castle

6 The situation recalls the one in B’s teleplay After the Rehearsal where the female characters may be seen as emanations of director Vogler’s dreamy imagination. (He has fallen asleep at his director’s desk.) The situation is repeated in B’s screenplay Faithless (2000) where an old man named Ingmar Bergman is sitting at his desk. “His imagination conjures forth a young woman […], who appears behind him, half hidden by the door” (Steene, 2005: 349).

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seemed located both behind the magic door and in the auditorium, in either case only visible to the audience in their imagination. Once inside the castle, the Daughter is determined to liberate its prisoner. Strindberg’s stage directions read: The Officer is sitting in on one of the chairs, wearing a highly unusual modern uniform. He is rocking in his chair and striking the table with his sabre.

The oddness of the uniform suggests the dreamy nature of the Officer. His aggressive handling of the sabre expresses his displeasure with life. But his rocking back and forth is a “movement without progress, action involving repetition, not change” (Quigley, 1985: 128). The Officer’s attitude, it will soon appear, is an aggressive variant of an attitude to life he shares with his fellow-men. B provided the Officer with an old-fashioned, Swedishlooking blue uniform with trousers he has long ago outgrown and a plumed helmet; sitting on the floor he beat the carpet with his sabre. The symbolic rocking movement was replaced by the more easily understandable idea that the Officer was a child masquerading as a grown-up, an idea – often expressed in B’s work – in line with the Daughter’s reference to mankind as människobarnen (the human children). The mysterious door in the theatre corridor plays a central role in the play. The door has an air-vent in the form of a four-leaf clover, the symbol of luck.7 No one has ever seen the door open. The Officer, reminded of the pantry of his childhood, asks himself what may be behind the door. At the insistence of the Daughter, the door is finally opened. Behind it is – nothing. That is to say: those looking behind the open door see nothing. Disappointed they ask the Daughter why she wanted the door to be opened. She enigmatically tells them: “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe it!” The Daughter has apparently wanted to demonstrate to mankind that opening the door is meaningless since they would be unable to see what is behind it. The moral seems to be that man should not seek to understand what he cannot understand.8 Nevertheless a kind of answer is given when the door later is seen in a new visual context, in the church. The four-leaf clover now looks like a (Maltese) 7 A penetrating analysis of the door symbolism is found in Bennich-Björkman, 1971: 65-73. 8 Hamlet, Strindberg writes, “wants to know what one is not permitted to know; and because of arrogantly wanting to know God’s secrets which have a right to remain secrets, Hamlet is punished by a kind of madness called scepticism, which leads to absolute uncertainty, and out of which the individual can be saved only by faith” (Strindberg, 1967: 102).

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cross. The symbolism of the air-vent hereby changes. Not luck but suffering is the meaning of life. At the same time the cross, like the four-leaf clover, stands for hope but of another kind, hope for a better future in another world. “O crux ave spes unica” (Hail to the Cross, our only hope), as it says on many Catholic gravestones as well as on Strindberg’s. Synchronised with the change from clover-leaf to cross is the change of the Officer’s red roses which, when withered, become a rod and reminiscent of the wreath of thorns that is placed on the head of the vicariously suffering Lawyer. B retained the rose symbolism but obscured the cross symbolism by not showing the church setting in the promotion scene where this symbolism would have been apparent. The degree ceremony presupposes some familiarity with this academic Swedish ritual at which every doctor of the last academic year receive their insignia from the dean of the faculty in question while at the same time a salute is being fired. Strindberg has the Officer wonder, when “the sound of church bells is heard,” if there is “a funeral in town.” lawyer. No, they are conferring degrees, doctor’s degrees. And I am just about to go and receive my doctorate in law! Perhaps you would like to graduate too and get a laurel wreath?

The Officer, who has done nothing to deserve the degree, happily agrees. After he has been laureated, the Lawyer in the last minute is refused his laurel.9 The scene was done as follows: Ringing of church bells. Chopin’s Funeral March is heard. An old ph. d. candidate walks up to the dean, receives his laurel wreath from him. Cannon shot. The officer walks up to the conferring dean, receives laurel wreath. Cannon shot. He takes off the wreath and waves victoriously10 with it. The lawyer in, takes off his outdoor clothes and galosches. Music stops. He walks stiffly in his tailcoat toward the dean, passes the king and queen in their ermine robes and with crowns on their heads, stops, drops his trousers, revealing his long drawers. Those present hold their noses and sniff, one or two laugh. He pulls up his trousers, walks stiffly up 9 A Swedish Doctor of Law is crowned with a doctor’s hat, not with a laurel wreath. Strindberg obviously wished to provide a link between the laurel wreath and the crown of thorns, a parallelby-contrast retained by B. 10 As if he has now found his Victoria. The name indicates the true nature of his love. But his victory is short-lived; very soon he is back in primary school and must learn to “mature.”

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to the deanwho holds a laurel wreath above his head but suddenly puts it away. All turn their backs on the lawyer. Headed by the royalties everyone exits.

The use of Chopin’s Funeral March was a loan from Molander (Bark, 1981: 156). The nose gesture of the attendants suggested that the Lawyer was smelling badly, either because, as he had earlier revealed, his clothes would “stink of other people’s crimes” or because at this moment, he had been unable to withhold his stool.11 Behind the upheld laurel wreaths the Crucified Christ with his crown of thorns could be seen. The Lawyer, rejected by society he had tried to serve and left alone in the church, was approached by the Daughter. She took the crown of thorns from the Crucified, put it on the Lawyer’s head as if promoting him, and said: “I’ll give you one that will be more becoming!” It was at this moment that the Daughter decided to marry the Lawyer. For the Lawyer’s room, where the central marriage scene takes place, the production script prescribes: Faint music from a barrel-organ. Courtyard exterior. The bed dominates. Blood-red cover. Cushions and torn sheets. Daughter hanging by the chief end – unkempt and with stained linen. The bed of the child is glimpsed. Kristin on a ladder is pasting. Stove with cooking utensils.

The utterly earth-bound Kristin was wholly dressed in grey. Strong searing white light on the bed made it stand out from the surrounding darkness. The Daughter, her arms raised as if “crucified to the bed-posts” (Andréason in Göteborgs-Posten) seemed imprisoned in the bed with its iron ‘bars.’ When the Lawyer joined her there the bed became the cage of their marriage. Liberation came when the Officer entered and strew the red roses he had earlier reserved for Victoria over the bed. Along with him the Daughter escaped first to Foulstrand, then to Fairhaven – only to discover that an earthly hell did not fundamentally differ from an earthly paradise, suffering being their common denominator. For Fairhaven, B’s stage directions in the production script read: Everything white. Silent snowfall. Beautiful waltzing in the background. The Gentleman and the Lady are sitting glutted. Children in summer dress 11 The dropping of the trousers may be seen as a visual pun on Swedish byxångest (lit. trouseranguish), the ultimate humiliation.

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are throwing ball. Ugly Edith is sitting, bare-headed, mournful, with bushy, disheveled hair. In front of her an open piano. Strong sunlight. Black sky.

The children were omitted in the performance. As in the 1970 production, all the dancers were dressed in white. Indicating the season and relating to the wreath symbolism, they wore Midsummer wreaths on their heads. The Daughter instead wore a modern red cap, a remnant of her earlier red dress. Strongly contrasting with the rest was the Quarantine Master from Foulstrand, a diabolic figure “dressed as a black-a-moor” (Strindberg) with a painted black face. Admonishing everyone to “dance before the plague breaks out,” he played a dirty trick on one of the dancers before escaping with her. The silent dancing of the dancers turned them into dreamlike puppets. Their waltz was eventually, as with Strindberg, drowned by Ugly Edith‘s playing of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, No. 10. After A Dream Play had been completed, Strindberg added a scene which, unlike all the others, is geographically located. The scene shows a beach on the Mediterranean. In the foreground to the left there is a white wall over which orange trees in fruit are visible. In the background villas and a Casino with a terrace. To the right, a huge pile of coal and two wheelbarrows. Upstage right, a strip of blue sea. Two coalheavers, naked to the waist, their faces, hands, and the exposed parts of their bodies blackened, are sitting on their wheelbarrows in despair. The daughter and the lawyer enter from the rear. daughter. This is paradise! first coalheaver. This is hell! second coalheaver. Forty-eight degrees in the shade! first coalheaver. Shall we take a dip?12 second coalheaver. We can’t. The police will come! Bathing’s forbidden here! first coalheaver. What about picking a fruit from the tree? second coalheaver. No, then the police will come!

The Daughter’s initial line is motivated by the fact that she sees only the aristocratic part of the scenery up left. She is immediately contradicted by the blackened First Coalheaver down right. In two lines, assisted by the scenery, the class society has been demonstrated.

12 The Swedish line is ambiguous and can also mean: “Shall we drown ourselves?”

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In B’s production, the Coalheaver scene was integrated into the Fairhaven scene, that is, transposed from the Mediterranean environment to Anywhere. The stage directions and the opening lines just quoted were eliminated. Instead the audience witnessed how the white-dressed dancers were frozen in their movements when the blackened Coalheavers, opening a lid in the floor, suddenly appeared from below with their coal sacks. Strindberg’s stark class contrast between lethargic vacationers and hardworking proletarians was retained but, with a stage devoid of scenery, it was expressed mainly in contrasting character appearance. The two Fingal’s Cave scenes in Strindberg’s play were reduced to one. For this scene the stage directions in the production script read: Writing-desk. Evening lamp. The Poet is arranging Fingal’s Cave, hands the Daughter some manuscripts. Both first read silently. He has dressed her in an Oriental shawl and puts the wreath of thorns on himself before the mirror.

The scene in Fingal’s Cave became a parodic piece of theatre-within-thetheatre. The Poet, in a blue gown and a laurel wreath coquettishly slanted on his head, and the Daughter, in a shimmering long red dress, read their parts aloud from the manuscript in an uninspired and amateurish manner as if alienating themselves from what they were reading. Their recital was done to the accompaniment of an old-fashioned record player and in front of a projection of Böcklin’s famous painting Toteninsel.13 In the closing scene, where we are back in front of the castle, Strindberg calls for a fire to which the Daughter offers her shoes, the part of her closest to this world of dust. Following her example, the other characters, one after the other, sacrifice their emblems to the fire. As in his earlier versions, B instead had the characters, Pirandellian fashion, return their emblems to the Poet. Here are three of them in Strindberg’s version: quarantine master enters. A small contribution, the black mask which made a blackamoor of me against my will. Exits. victoria enters. My beauty, my sorrow! Exits. edith enters. My ugliness, my sorrow! Exits.

13 Böcklin’s Toteninsel (Isle of the Dead), which is projected at the end of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata, was never used in any of B’s four productions of that play. He found it “a horrible piece of art” although he “liked it a lot as a child”; a reproduction of the painting was hanging in his paternal home (Törnqvist, 1973: 226).

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All three abstain from what has been most painful to them. Suffering is universally inherent in human life. Inspired by the Quarantine Master’s mask, B let also the two women abstain from masks, their outward persona. When the Quarantine Master removed his black mask, he surprisingly revealed an identical black face underneath it. Did it mean that his hope that his persona would be totally different from his inner nature was an illusion? Did it mean that his face had become another mask, just as the Lawyer’s face? The text says, “reflects all the kinds of crimes and vices in which his profession has necessarily involved him.” Whatever the audience could make of it, this sudden mystery seemed to disturb Strindberg’s idea that all the sacrificing characters, despite their various emblems, form a chorus testifying to universal suffering. As the Daughter took farewell of her human children, they all kneeled before her. When she entered the burning castle, there was a strong searing light silhouetting the human figures left behind as black shadows. This was followed by darkness when they disappeared from the stage. At last one and the same piano note as was heard in the beginning was struck, a note which, like human life, was doomed to peter out. Much of the performance was recognisable to those who had seen B’s 1970 production of A Dream Play, which B in hindsight regarded as the best of his four stagings of the play (Sjögren, 2002: 339). This may have been one reason why his fourth attempt was somewhat lukewarmly received. Bengt Jahnsson in Dagens Nyheter was outright negative. “If the Prologue disappears,” he wrote, “the initial magic disappears.” Lisbeth Larsson in Expressen found that Lena Olin as Agnes had the “optimistic matter-of-factness” of a child, but Sverker Andréason in Göteborgs-Posten found her “stereotype.” B himself later declared that she “was no Indra’s Daughter, not a bit” (Timm, 2008: 543). The scene in Fingal’s Cave was unanimously criticised. B himself afterwards found it abortive; referring to his handling of this scene, he admitted that his attempt to make a joke of what to him were “unbearably high-flown bits of trash” in the play did not work (Timm, 2008: 543). Rather exceptional was Tomas Bredsdorff‘s enthusiastic review in Politiken, ending with the words “a scenic masterpiece.”

5.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Hamlet is presumably the world’s most widely read, performed, and analysed drama. Yet nobody knows the authentic text. The play has survived in a corrupt version known as the Bad Quarto, in a much better version known as the Good Quarto, and in yet another, quite good version published in the First Folio. As a result current editions of the play reveal a number of differences (Wells, 1970: 5f.). The Swedish translation used by B is by Britt G. Hallqvist and based on Harold Jenkin’s edition (Shakespeare, 1982). Hamlet is a very long play even by Shakespearean standards. As a result it is always shortened in performance. In B’s version a little more than 1/3 of the text was deleted (Steene, 2005: 689). Once more, the deletions were indicated in the theatre program. Of the characters, Volteman and Cornelius, messengers to the King of Norway, were omitted, as was Polonius’ servant Reynaldo, the Second gravedigger, and some other minor figures. A Courtier serving Ophelia was also changed to a Lady in waiting. At a meeting shortly before the dress rehearsal of A Dream Play in April 1986, B outlined the scenery for his planned Hamlet production: an “empty stage, possibly two chairs, but not necessarily. Stationary lights, no coloured filters, no special atmospherics. A circle, five meters in diameter welded into the floor, close to the audience. Here the action takes place.” In the actual production a circular acting area was outlined on the stage floor. This area was contained within a greater circle, circumscribing almost the whole stage (Marker/Marker, 1992: 261f.).1 The performance opened with three curtains, Dramaten’s ordinary red one, followed by a replica of it, this again followed by a black curtain, foreshadowing the two dominant colours of the performance and a reminder that theatre is “not just for pleasure,” the device of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, copied on the trestle stage used later in the playwithin-the play, the mouse trap scene. The red curtains were accompanied by romantic piano music, the famous waltz in Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow.2 The music was an ironic glance at Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, recently widowed and now remarried to Claudius, the brother and successor of Gertrud’s former husband, old King Hamlet. When the black 1 Cf. Kott’s view (1964: 71) in his chapter “Hamlet of the Mid-Century”: “We will try to break with nineteenth-century naturalism, and be content with a back-cloth, rostrum and two chairs on either side of the stage.” 2 Staged by B at the City Theatre in Malmö in 1954.

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curtain appeared the music stopped abruptly and was replaced by the sound of strong wind. The audience was in this way suddenly transposed from red to black, from merry-making to the relief of the guard at night outside Elsinore castle. Shakespeare’s five-act play opens with the Ghost scene. Francisco, one of the sentinels, is relieved of his watch by Bernardo, another sentinel. A third sentinel, Marcellus, enters with Horatio, prince Hamlet’s friend. The sentinels inform Horatio that they have twice seen the Ghost of old King Hamlet, Hamlet’s recently dead father. When the Ghost appears again, he discloses to Hamlet that he has been murdered by his brother Claudius, now his successor to the throne. He asks Hamlet to avenge him. Is the Ghost real or imagined? The scholars disagree about this. Some argue that since not only Hamlet, but also Bernardo, Marcellus and Horatio see the Ghost, it must be real; in the cellar scene (I.5) they even hear the Ghost when it admonishes them to swear on their swords. Other scholars, who believe that only Hamlet hears the Ghost in the cellar scene, point out that the Ghost addresses only Hamlet both in the opening and later (in III.4) when Hamlet is alone with Gertrude; from this they conclude that the Ghost is a hallucination on his part. What concerns us here is what the spectators of B’s Hamlet made of his Ghost. B eliminated the cellar scene, thereby strengthening the contrast between Hamlet and the other characters with regard to the Ghost. In his version there were the following gradations: Bernardo, Marcellus, Horatio see the Ghost. Hamlet both sees and hears the Ghost. Gertrude neither sees nor hears the Ghost.

As the son of King Hamlet, Hamlet obviously had a special relationship to the Ghost, increased by the fact that the Ghost had an urgent message to him: the revelation about the nature of his death. To the two sentinels the appearance of the Ghost, although they recognised old King Hamlet in him, was either an ominous sign that the King could not find rest in his grave or, more widely, that the time was “out of joint,” to quote Hamlet. That Gertrude was unaware of the Ghost was hardly surprising; feeling extremely guilty toward her son at this point not only because of her over-hasty marriage with Claudius but also because of Claudius’ fratricide that had been imitated in the play-within-the-play she had just witnessed, she had every reason to repress whatever was connected with her former husband; she was psychologically blind to the Ghost.

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If a director would choose not to visualise the Ghost in the closet scene between Hamlet and his mother, the audience would easily agree with Gertrude’s remark that Hamlet is mad. If the Ghost is visualised, as was the case with B, they would be less certain. The same goes for the initial Ghost scenes. In either situation, the mere fact that B’s audience shared Hamlet’s experience, made the Ghost, as it were, real. In Act I.1 the Ghost first appeared from the auditorium in the form of a sudden strong light on Bernardo, Marcellus and Horatio, seated downstage, facing the audience. When they turned their backs to the audience, a white light spot far upstage indicated that the Ghost was now to be found there, this time seen also by the audience – as if both they and the characters were in a cinema.3 Separated vision had become shared vision. Hamlet’s experience of the Ghost was gradual. Surrounded by darkness, studded by white spots as a nocturnal heaven is by stars – visualising man and the universe – he was looking around, searching for it. Then the Ghost entered, dressed in a big white robe. In his prompt script B asks himself: “How does one react when meeting one’s father as a ghost,” and, referring to the Ghost, “what does someone look like who has spent two months in purgatory?” Rather than Shakespeare’s warlike Ghost in armour B’s audience was confronted with a peaceful spirit, dressed as he might have been when he was killed while taking a nap in his garden. Hamlet was inside the inner circle which at this point signified the limit of this globe, this life.4 When the Ghost began to tell Hamlet about the murder, they joined hands above the delimiting circle. The joined hands were strongly lit from above. When the Ghost finished his story about the murder with “O horrible! most horrible!” their hands separated whereupon Hamlet again took hold of the Ghost’s hand. Then both stood up and embraced. “A pact had been sealed” (Marker/Marker, 1992: 265).5 In Act I.2 we are inside the royal castle. King Claudius announces to his Councilors that Volteman and Cornelius are to be sent to King Fortinbras of Norway, to persuade him to prevent young Fortinbras, his namesake

3 Cf. B’s description of the cinema viewer, hypnotised by “the white spot” in front of him or her (Timm, 1994: 147). 4 The Ghost, it says in the prompt script, “tries to get inside the circle but is always pushed back. […] Hamlet stretches out his hand outside the circle. The Ghost gets hold of the outstretched hand. Now Hamlet is definitely and finally changed.” 5 The implied reference is to Don Juan’s fatal handshake with the Stone Guest in Molière’s Don Juan, three times staged by B. Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust also comes to mind – as does the Old Man’s pact with the Student in Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata.

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and nephew, from threatening Denmark with military action. This is the official reason for the meeting. B was not interested in this political aspect. He eliminated both the messengers and their message. With him the scene began quite differently, with a scream. Lustful? Deadly? Whose? It quickly appeared that it was the salacious scream of Claudius, vaguely seen upstage, running after Gertrude, both dressed in imperial red robes. Rolling across the floor to centre-stage they were united in coitus a tergo. When they stood up a row of Counselors in red robes and white wigs formed a semi-circle behind them; ‘directed’ by Polonius, in a fur-edged robe, they mechanically applauded the royalties after their perversity. Through this bizarre image the audience was immediately introduced to the “rotten state of Denmark.” Hamlet entered and sat down on a chair centre-stage; facing the audience he significantly turned his back to Claudius. Mourning his father, his (traditional) black appearance strikingly differed from the redness of the court behind him. With his turtleneck sweater, trousers, raincoat, shoes, and sunglasses he could have been one of the young men in the audience. This was Hamlet as Everyman. At this point in the play he had not yet heard about the Ghost. Nonetheless, it was disturbing to him to hear Claudius speak of his mother as “our former sister-in-law, now queen.”6 For a long time he remained immobile in a limp position, his eyes turned down, his face expressionless. This caused the King to ask why “the clouds still hang” on him. To which Hamlet protested with a line drawing attention to his sunglasses: “Not so – I get too much sun here.”7 Polonius at this uncomfortable answer ordered the Councilors to turn their backs on the controversy between Hamlet and the King, only to order them to turn around again when the King called himself “a father” for Hamlet and declared that Hamlet was “nearest to the throne.” Official statements were separated from unofficial ones in this very concrete form of censorship led by the court’s propaganda minister. When the King blandishingly addressed Hamlet as “our son,” the King and the Queen were seen at either side of him, as if forming a trinity, the Queen kneeling and caressing her son.8

6 The original has “our sometime sister,” which more clearly alludes to the fact that the marriage to Shakespeare’s contemporaries was incestuous (Kitto 1964: 257). 7 The original here has “I am too much in the sun,” where the last word is an untranslatable pun on ‘son.’ B replaced this verbal pun with visual imagery: the sunglasses that would protect Hamlet from the ‘sun’ of King and court. 8 Cf. the family grouping of stepfather-mother-son in Fanny and Alexander, where the stepfather-bishop corresponds to Claudius, Emily to Gertrude and Alexander to Hamlet.

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Left alone by the court Hamlet gave vent to what ailed him: “O that this solid flesh of shame would thaw, melt.”9 The soliloquy was preceded by a violent scream as if Hamlet was suffocating. Spot-lit, he was now surrounded by darkness. When referring to his father – “a king as brilliant as Apollo” – he looked at a miniature portrait of him in his hand. When referring to Claudius – that ugly “satyr” – he looked to the left where the King had recently disappeared. The soliloquy was interrupted by the entrance of Horatio along with Marcellus and Bernardo. Even more than with Shakespeare, B’s Horatio was conceived as Hamlet’s bosom friend since their time at the University of Wittenberg. They were both of the same age, around 33.10 Unlike but related to Hamlet’s all-black appearance was Horatio’s all-in-grey: grey student blazer with a Wittenberg crest, grey trousers, stiff collar, shirt-front, grey overcoat, grey gloves, grey bowler hat, black shoes with grey gaiters, cane, pince-nez; in short, a bourgeois dandy from the end of the 19th century. Following the original, Hallqvist had Horatio address Hamlet with “my prince” and with the formal “ni” (corresponding to French vous). B stressed his close friendship with Hamlet by changing the former address to “my friend,” the latter to the intimate “du” (corresponding to French tu). The two men embraced several times; Hamlet jokingly at one point placed Horatio’s hat on his own head; toward the end he rested on Horatio’s lap; and once they even mouth-kissed. Especially the last caused some critics to see them as a homosexual couple. With this in mind Hamlet’s harsh attacks both of Gertrude and of Ophelia made sense. However, seeing Hamlet as a homosexual necessarily would disturbingly overshadow the primary reason why he reacted as he did to the two women: the impact of his mother’s hasty remarriage. It seemed more meaningful to regard B’s Horatio as Hamlet’s constant grey shadow, his more balanced alter ego suppressed through the recent events. This would be a less realistic, more figurative explanation for the bodily intimacy between the two men, an intimacy shared by two other male couples: the Ghost and Hamlet – father and son – and, as we shall see, Hamlet and the First Player. Act I.3 opens with Laertes’ leave-taking from his sister Ophelia. He is about to leave for Paris. B had Ophelia enter with a wreath of flowers on 9 Hallqvist’s version of “O that this too sullied flesh would melt…”, was a subtle combination of different readings of the key word, ‘solid,’ ‘sullied’ or ‘sallied.’ 10 The text sometimes suggests that Hamlet is around twenty, at other times that he is around thirty (Bradley, 1963: 344ff.). B wanted Hamlet to be played by someone around thirty (Duncan/ Wanselius, 2008: 553).

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her head, barefoot and dressed in a light-blue shift, Laertes a little later with a chest, a piece of a travel equipment indicating that he was about to leave. Ophelia put the wreath on his head. They kissed and embraced. When Polonius appeared, now in a black suit, grey waistcoat and with a brown briefcase – the busy civil servant – Laertes, ashamed of his intimacy with his sister, hid the wreath behind his back. Whereupon Ophelia helped him by taking it from him and coquettishly putting it back on her own head. The little scene stressed the genuine love between brother and sister as well as their obedience to their father’s chilly paternalism. The spontaneous normality of their relationship implicitly contrasted with the Hamlet-Ophelia relationship. In Act II.1, Ophelia, rushing to Polonius and kissing his hand, tells him about Hamlet’s recent strange behaviour, in Hallqvist’s translation: As I sat sewing in my closet prince Hamlet entered with his coat slit open, and without a hat.11 And the stockings hanging foul’d, ungarter’d around his ancles like shackles. His face as white as his shirt, his knees clearly shaking.12

In the performance this was changed to: As I sat sewing in my closet prince Hamlet entered with his shirt slit open, and without shoes. His face gray as ashes.

“Without shoes” – like B’s barefoot Ophelia, whose hair was now disheveled, an early sign of her inner bewilderment. Polonius ‘consoled’ her with a pat on her head and a push against her cheek when he asked her if she had not been too harsh with Hamlet. (It was in fact Polonius himself who had told her to ask Hamlet no more to see her.) 11 It was normal among the Elizabethans to wear a hat also indoors (Shakespeare, 1982: 234). 12 Cf. the original: My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, Lord Hamlet, – with his doublet all unbraced, No hat upon his head, his stockings foul’d, Ungarter’d and down-gyved to his ancle; Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other.

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From now on Ophelia began to move along the stage floor circle in the background. Off and on she stopped her peripheral circling as if, compassionate but powerless, she sensed the terrible things happening around her. It worked the other way too. “She was on the mind of all the other characters,” B told Sjögren (2002: 181). In Act II.2, Hamlet asks the First Player to recite a passage about Hecuba’s response to the death of her husband, King Priam. We learn that Hecuba’s grief was profound: Alas, he who has seen his [Priam’s] queen half-dressed, barefoot run around, blinded by tears in her attempt to quench the flames [...] with a sheet she has grabbed in wild panic around her thin loins […] – he who this had seen would surely have thrown curses in revolt ‘gainst fate.13

To Hamlet, Hecuba responded in a natural way to her husband’s death, Gertrude did not. B’s counterpart of Hecuba was Ophelia. Her reaction to the calamities around her, for her culminating in Hamlet’s murder of her father Polonius, was like Hecuba’s. Echoed in Ophelia’s behaviour, the passage was firmly tied to the action of the play. Hamlet even identified himself with Hecuba when later, alone, he wrapped himself in the yellow cloth the actors had left behind, entered the trestle stage and asked himself: “What’s Hecuba to him [the actor playing the part], he to her / that he can weep like that?” The actor’s intense compassion for a fictive Hecuba was here contrasted with Hamlet’s own indifference to her ‘real’ counterpart, Ophelia.

13 Cf. for intelligibility the original which reads: But who – ah, woe! – had seen the mobbled queen […] Run barefoot up and down, threat’ning the flames With bisson rheum […] and, for a robe, About her lank and all o’erteemed loins A blanket, in th’alarm of fear caught up – Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steep’d, ‘Gainst Fortune’s state would treason have pronounc’d.

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The most well-known part of Hamlet, the soliloquy beginning “To be or not to be,” occurs in Act III.1 after the King and Polonius have planned to overhear Hamlet’s conversation with Ophelia in order to find out what the reason for his strange behaviour could be. Is it depression after his father’s sudden death or is it unrequited love for Ophelia? B moved the soliloquy to the next scene and had Hamlet utter it to the First Player: hamlet, dagger in hand, embraces the first player, then mock-stabs him in the back with the dagger while quietly laughing to himself. To be or not to be, that is the question if it is nobler patiently to suffer the blows and arrows of a horrid fate or to take arms against a sea of torments and resolutely kill them? To be allowed to die – sleep, His hand against the first player’s heart. no more […] ‘twould be an end, a mercy quietly to be prayed for.

The change from soliloquy to monologue enabled B’s Hamlet to dramatise the speech. The First Player could here be seen as Hamlet’s alter ego who was figuratively stabbed as a sign that suicide was on Hamlet’s mind. In another sense he could be seen as a stand-in for Claudius whom Hamlet wanted to kill. Since the actor doing the part of the First Player could be recognised as the one who had earlier done the part of the Ghost, there was in addition a suggestive link between Hamlet’s relation to the two, stressed by his embrace of them both. The fact that Hamlet was addressing an actor who represented both his father,14 his stepfather, and himself made the whole speech very complex and very histrionic. The borderline between seeming and being, persona and face, was suggestively blurred. Act III.1 opened with the Queen entering, followed by Polonius carrying a pair of red shoes; after them Ophelia: queen. Ophelia, I hope your young beauty is Holds a hand-mirror in front of ophelia, paints her lips. polonius puts down the shoes. the sweet reason for my son’s bewilderment.

14 In a radio interview with Mikael Timm April 20, 1987 (quoted from Koskinen 1998: 33, note 43) B declared that Hamlet at this point felt that the First Player was his father.

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While the Queen put the red shoes on Ophelia’s bare feet, Polonius offered the young woman a “prayerbook” to give her “the semblance of devotion” when she was to meet Hamlet. The Councillor and the Queen operated in smooth conjunction, turning Ophelia into – in their view – an at once sensually attractive and devote young lady. In fact they gave the innocent Ophelia the semblance of a whore. While this was happening on the well-lit part of the stage to the right, the King’s face was seen to the left, surrounded by darkness. His soliloquy bore a clear relationship to what had just been enacted: king to himself. […] The cheek of a whore, painted with rouge, can hardly be uglier beneath the mask than my deeds despite all gilded words and phrases.

Claudius’ verbal imagery here spilled over to the action of his “collaborators,” Gertrude and Polonius. When Hamlet appears and finds Ophelia alone, the King and Polonius are, unseen, overhearing their conversation. Much ink has been spilt on the question whether Hamlet is aware of their presence or not, if his brutal attitude to Ophelia is pretended or genuine. His admonishment to Ophelia “Get thee to a nunnery,” is ambiguous; next to the literal meaning, a place of chastity, ‘nunnery’ could mean its opposite: a brothel (Shakespeare, 1982: 493ff.). This verbal ambiguity could not be retained in translation. B replaced it with ironical moralising when he had Hamlet suggest that Ophelia, now made up as a whore, should go to a “nunnery.” The repeated admonishments were accompanied by increasingly aggressive touches of Ophelia’s body, ending in a mock-coitus. Half-way through the play, The Murder of Gonzago, is performed. As Hamlet’s designation “The Mousetrap” indicates, the play, in which Claudius’ murder of his brother is imitated, is meant to test the King. If he reacts violently to the play, he is guilty, if not, he is not. With Shakespeare the play is preceded by a dumbshow showing the same events as in the playlet. Why the action is doubled in this way has led to much speculation. This does not concern us since B deleted the dumbshow entirely. B placed the trestle stage on which the play-within-the play was performed between Hamlet and Ophelia – the latter with a sensual red cloth over her light-blue shift – on this side of it and the King and Queen on the far side. The Theatre King, acted by the First Player, was in a white robe (like the Ghost), his murderer Lucianus (corresponding to Claudius) in a

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black one (cf. Hamlet). When Lucianus appeared on the stage, Hamlet was making rude sexual gestures to Ophelia below and in front of it: ophelia. You go too far. hamlet mock-raping ophelia. You would scream and groan if I went too far with you. ophelia screams. Worse and worse.

Hamlet’s mock-rape was presumably intended to imitate the adultery that, to his mind, had taken place between Lucianus alias Claudius and the (Theatre) Queen. This was B’s way of doubling the action. The killing of Gonzago, it has been said, represents not only Claudius’ killing of his brother but also Hamlet’s desire to kill Claudius (Shakespeare, 1982: 508); the latter interpretation explains why in the play it is the nephew who is the killer and why he with B was dressed in black. Claudius soon proclaimed himself guilty by crying for light and rushing away from the room. After which Hamlet was seen strangely dancing around with Ophelia, now a whore-like puppet without any will of her own, a figure representing all women in Hamlet’s mind. His dance was linked to the King’s handling of the whore-like Pelageia (B’s invention) in the following scene, an ugly version of the Queen, greyhaired with a dark-brown wig in her hands, indicating her double nature. The King was himself at this point dressed in grey long underwear covered by a red cloak, a glaring contrast between inward and outward, face and persona. As in the case of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be,” B here turned the King’s soliloquy – his confession of his fratricide – into a talking to his own double, the depraved partner, an image both of himself and of the Queen. When he forced a bottle into Pelageia’s mouth and forced her to drink, it not only demonstrated unbridled revelry – Hamlet had earlier referred to the Danes as swinish drunkards – it was also a reminder of the poison that Claudius had poured into his brother’s ear. While Claudius voiced his pangs of conscience, the Ghost was seen to the far left, where he had earlier appeared. Was it a way of concretising Claudius’ guilt feelings? Or was it a way to indicate that the victim had become an avenger, an agent of Nemesis? The reason why Hamlet does not kill the King when he finds him alone praying has been much discussed by the scholars in connection with the more fundamental question why Hamlet delays even after he has got proof of Claudius’ guilt. B’s Claudius fell on his knees, beat his breast, and clasped his hands as if asking forgiveness for his sins. Behind him Hamlet appeared,

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a dagger in his hand. His dagger touched Claudius’ neck, then his heart. B presented the sequence seemingly realistically, yet utterly unrealistic, since it would be impossible in reality for Claudius not to notice a dagger right in front of him. By keeping the sequence in this mixed mood, it seemed as if Hamlet’s chance to murder the King was an expression of his wishful thinking rather than that of a factual possibility. Did Gertrude practice adultery with Claudius when she was married to Hamlet’s father? The critics have been divided on this issue. The Ghost never says she did; and he tells Hamlet to be conciliatory with his mother. Whatever we think about this, it is obvious that Hamlet has strong doubts about her faithfulness. His doubts seemed strengthened in B’s production, where Gertrude not only had agreed to an “o’erhasty” marriage, but also was seen publicly copulating with Claudius and thought she prettified Ophelia when she gave her the appearance of a slut – all signs pointing in the direction of adultery. B’s closet scene did not change this picture. Gertrude, who had ordered Hamlet to come to her closet, now appeared in a black, lilac-tinted dress with black rather than red hair – cf. the two wigs of her counterpart Pelageia. She appeared together with Polonius who told her to upbraid her son for his unbearable “pranks.” When Hamlet approached, Polonius hid behind an arras. Mother and son immediately began to reproach each other, Gertrude using her hand-mirror, revealing both her concern with her outward self – she had earlier used it for Ophelia in the same way – and her attempt to evade her son’s glances. Hamlet told her that he would set her up another kind of mirror, “where she would see her inmost.” Fearing for her life, Gertrude screamed for help. Polonius behind the arras echoed her with “Help, help!” Whereupon Hamlet thrust his penknife through the arras. With Shakespeare, Hamlet then discovers a dead Polonius. B instead had Polonius stagger across the closet holding a handkerchief before one eye, thereby indicating where the penknife had wounded him. When he collapsed Hamlet f inished him off with his penknife and callously kicked the dying man. All of it was sensed by Ophelia in the background. Harassing Gertrude with miniature portraits of her two husbands, Hamlet then reproached her for switching from a godlike man to a villain. The Ghost now appeared. Experienced only by Hamlet (and the spectators), it admonished him to speak kindly to his mother. This was followed by Hamlet’s alternating reactions to his mother. After he had asked her not to seek Claudius’ bed, he said the opposite:

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hamlet exits. The queen puts on the necklace with Claudius’ miniature portrait and starts to look at herself in the hand-mirror. hamlet re-enters. hamlet. One word more, Madame. queen. What shall I do? hamlet. By no means what I bid you do! Let that pig tempt you to his bed […]

By having Hamlet exit and re-enter, B could show how Gertrude, left alone, fell back on her old pattern. This motivated Hamlet’s sudden switch from tenderness to renewed cruel attacks on her. Fearing for his life, Claudius sends Hamlet to England on a diplomatic pretext. Alone, he discloses that he is actually sending him to his death. B more openly had him reveal to his secretary that the message to the English King was “that Hamlet be killed at once.” On his way to the boat taking him to England, Hamlet happens to meet Fortinbras’ soldiers on their way to fight about “a little patch of ground” in Poland. Updating and universalising the situation, B dressed the soldiers in British WW I uniforms and helmets. Like the actor who could weep tears for Hecuba, a fictive character, Fortinbras, fighting for something seemingly worthless, contrasts with Hamlet – “What do I myself?” – whose duty to avenge his father is both real and significant. Yet Hamlet remains passive. Spurred by the soldiers who had paused behind him, B’s Hamlet started writing a letter to Horatio: “What is a man…,” then turned to a soliloquy ending: “Blood will henceforth be my endeavour. From this day / it governs my will, fills completely my self.” After which he, as it were, renewed the pact with the Ghost by writing BLOOD on the black wing behind him. Her father murdered by the man she loved, Ophelia goes mad. She now appeared in a white shift, covered by a penitentiary grey horse-hair cloth and low black boots. In remembrance of her father’s death, she held a white handkerchief to one eye. Positing herself between the King in red and the Queen in black, she held the King’s hand and let the other rest on the Queen’s shoulder while reciting: “You swore when you got me flat / to make a wife of me.” But he answered, she adds: “Yes, that was then but you are / a bad girl now!” Whereupon she beat the King’s breast and leaned against the Queen, then put the King’s hand to one of her eyes, the Queen’s to the other eye while thanking for “all good advice” and covered herself in her horse-hair cloth as if it was a burqa. Informed that his father has been killed, Laertes returns from France. Erroneously believing that the King is behind the murder, he finds support among the people, who shout “Laertes shall be king”; together with his

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followers he enters the castle. B deleted this sociopolitical aspect and let Laertes approach the King alone. In black coat and black boots he went up to the King and pointed his pistol at him, cowardly hidden behind the Queen. When the Queen walked up to Laertes with outstretched hands, he pointed the pistol to her forehead, then broke down and leaned against her, crying. In his black mourning attire and his ambivalent reactions to the Queen, he was like another Hamlet. Re-entering, Ophelia was dressed in a huge regal brocade gown, with a red-and-white flower pattern, the hem patinated so that it looked as if she had been wading through mud.15 Was the mad girl imagining herself as a princess or queen, married to Hamlet? In her hand she held nails which she handed out to those around her as if they were flowers. Rosemary and pansies – for remembrance and thoughts – were given to Laertes, fennel and columbines, signifying marital infidelity (Shakespeare, 1982: 359), for the Queen, rue or herb o’grace for the King. The handing out of the rue was accompanied by her drawing a cross with a nail on the King’s forehead, the herb o’grace by her caressing of the King’s cheek. The Gravedigger scene is a grimly humorous interlude in the play’s serious action. The text was here radically changed; some bits were deleted, other bits, often with reference to the world of the audience, added. The scene opened with a lid in the floor being opened. Up came the Gravedigger in blue overall, black jacket, red nose, bowler hat, food box, thermos, a contemporary and yet unreal figure since gravediggers no longer exist in Sweden. He was played by the same actor who had earlier done Polonius; apart from this ironical combination, there was an irony in the fact that someone so reminiscent of Ophelia’s father was now busy digging her grave. Two masked Pierrots, all in white and furnished with saxophone, trombone and drum accompanied the Gravedigger’s initial music-hall song, a burlesque memento mori. When the Gravedigger found the skull of Yorick, the King’s sometime court jester, he plucked a worm from it, then recalled how Yorick had once poured a bottle of “Rhine wine” over his head – B changed it to “Aalborg,” the Danish aquavit. Returned from England, Hamlet showed up, with Horatio, a knitted black cap on his head,16 further a grey work coat, brown corduroy trousers, and black half-boots. Addressing Yorick who used to carry him on his back when he was a child, Hamlet tenderly spoke to the skull, putting his cap on it. Another memento mori. 15 The dress had been used in two earlier productions of Mary Stuart (Bergman/ Harning, 2008: 92ff.). 16 The cap was similar to the one B used to wear as a young director (Steene, 2005: 691).

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The ringing of church bells announced that Ophelia’s funeral procession was approaching. Below modern black umbrellas the participants, all in mourning, sought protection from the rain. Or were they just hiding behind these uniform ‘masks’? The Queen’s bouquet of roses,17 soon to be thrown into the grave, formed a red spot in the overwhelming blackness. The mourners gathered around the open grave. The corpse, covered in a red cloak, was lowered into the grave. After the priest – in a Swedish rather than Danish clerical collar – had declared that Ophelia only by royal decree was allowed to be buried in sanctified ground with a “virgin wreath” on her head,18 Laertes banned the priest, leapt into the grave, raised his dead sister and declared that he wished to join her in death. Hamlet then appeared and professed his love for Ophelia. He and Laertes began to grapple but were soon separated by the King and Horatio. When the attendants disappeared, Ophelia was seen standing in the background in her light-blue shift and a wreath on her head, visualising that she was in everyone’s mind. For the final fencing between Hamlet and Laertes, the King and Laertes had conspired a plan guaranteeing Hamlet’s death. Both the point of Laertes’ sword and the chalice of wine to be handed to Hamlet by the King were to be poisoned. The fencing significantly took place on the same trestle stage that had earlier been used for The Murder of Gonzago. Eight masked Councillors in wigs and red robes, acting as jury, were seen on the far side of the stage, the King and the Queen, their backs to the audience, on this side of it. Osric, acting as judge, provided the combatants with their swords. The King entered the stage and drank to Hamlet’s health. He then put a pearl in his cup more valuable, he said, than that to be found in the crowns of four earlier Danish kings. The fencing began. After two hits in Hamlet’s favour, the production script has it: osric. A hit, an obvious hit. laertes. Well, come again. king. Stay, give me wine. Look, Hamlet, here is the pearl. Now it is yours. Now I toast to your health. Drums, trumpets and cannon shots. Give him the cup. hamlet. No, first another bout. Let the cup stand. Come on! 17 In his prompt script B writes: “The Queen strews flowers. Lilies. Meadow-flowers. What?” 18 As a sign of maidenhood, a garland was traditionally placed on the bier at burial and afterwards hung up in the church (Shakespeare, 1982: 389).

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They fight. Another hit. What do say? laertes. Touché, I do confess. king. Our Hamlet wins. queen. He’s sweating and scant of breath. Hamlet, take my handkerchief and wipe your brow. Now the Queen drinks to Hamlet’s health. hamlet. I thank you, madam. king. Gertrude, do not drink! queen. I wish to drink now – excuse me. She drinks and offers the cup to hamlet. king aside. She drank from the poison! Now it’s too late! hamlet. I dare not drink yet – but soon. queen. Come, let me wipe your brow.

In the performance this became: osric. A hit, an obvious hit. Applause by the king and the masked councillors, not by the queen. laertes. Well, come again. They fight. hamlet. Another hit. What do you say? laertes. Touché, I do confess. The queen gets up, takes the cup beside the king who is too preoccupied by the fighting to pay any attention to her. king. Our Hamlet wins. Applause by the king and the masked councilors. queen half turned away from the king. Now the Queen drinks to Hamlet’s health. The cup touches her mouth. king turning to the queen, his hand outstretched to her, whispers. Gertrude, do not drink! queen firmly. No. Moves away from his outstretched hand, whispers. I wish to drink now. Drinks, hands the cup back to the king. Come, Hamlet, let me wipe your brow. Moves to hamlet. Both of them on their knees next to the trestle stage. She wipes his brow. hamlet returning to the trestle stage. A third time – and no more tricks! The queen slowly creeps back to her chair, gets up. She and the king keep staring at each other. She sits down.

The Queen’s toasting of Hamlet was an important moment since the audience knew that the wine was poisoned. How would the King react? To direct the audience’s attention to this, B had the characters in the background momentarily freeze their action. When the fight continued the King ignored

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the fencing and was looking only at the Queen hanging limp on her chair. Hamlet, wounded in his arm by Laertes’ sword, looked at his arm to indicate that he sensed he was poisoned. When Laertes accidentally dropped his sword, Hamlet picked it up and offered Laertes his own. Seconds later he hit Laertes with the poisoned sword. As Laertes was dying on the stage, the Queen was collapsing below it. B’s text was explicit: king. She fainted when she saw blood. queen. No, the wine. Dear Hamlet, I am poisoned. It was the wine, the wine. She dies.

In the performance this became: king looks at the queen, grips her arm. She fainted when she saw blood. queen falling back on her chair, dying. No, Hamlet, it’s the wine, the wine.

As could be guessed from the Queen’s behaviour, she was not, as the text suggests, drinking the wine in good faith, in which case her death is a highly ironical quid pro quo on the part of the King. As some of the critics observed, B’s Queen deliberately committed suicide; a single word in the prompt script – “Vet!” (Knows!) written next to the deleted “excuse me” – confirms this interpretation. Having seen her son murder Polonius; by now aware that her husband had committed fratricide; having experienced Ophelia’s suicide; and, most of all, suffering from guilt feelings for all that had happened, she had no wish to stay alive. Suspecting that the pearl the King had dropped in the cup was actually poisonous, she chose to end her life. When Laertes revealed that “the King is to blame,” Hamlet, supported by Queen’s limp arm, wounded the King with the poisoned sword. Trying to escape, the King was stopped by the Ghost who embraced him as Hamlet, supported by Horatio behind him, gave him the killing thrust. Nemesis had been administered. Dying, Hamlet was seen in a spotlight facing the audience with Horatio, who had just offered to die with him, like a shadow with closed eyes behind him. With a smile, Hamlet turned around, embraced Horatio and fell down dead. When Fortinbras arrives to greet King Claudius, he encounters four corpses: Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, Hamlet. Horatio says he will recount to the “yet unknowing world / How these things came about.” Fortinbras says he has “some rights of memory in this kingdom,” indicating that he will now be the new King. He orders Hamlet’s body to be borne off in honour “like a soldier.” Both the real and the prospective kings are dead. Long live the new and – implicitly good – King, who is to be a strong version of Hamlet.

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B’s ending was a far cry from this conciliatory conclusion which it in fact directly contradicted. Taking the audience by surprise right up to their own modern world, Hamlet’s “the rest is silence” was abruptly broken off by the deafening sound of fierce rock music as Fortinbras’ black-dressed soldiers with riot helmets and submachine guns crowded the stage. Fortinbras himself, dressed as a guerilla leader in beret, black shiny uniform and jackboots, went up to Hamlet to check that he was indeed dead, then did the same with the Queen and the King. Posing as a victor, he addressed the press, represented by a woman with a microphone and a cameraman, both dressed in red uniforms, a colour that by this time had come to be associated not only with royalty but also with blood. When Horatio screamingly began to tell the woman with the microphone about the perversions of the Danish court, Fortinbras pushed her and the cameraman aside, then gave a sign to his soldiers to take Horatio away, obviously to be executed. The man of integrity who could have told posterity the truth about what had happened was brutally murdered. Hamlet’s story was not to be told. History was violated. The Queen, Laertes, and the King were all dumped into what a while ago was Ophelia’s grave. Posing again, now also for the TV camera, Fortinbras declared that he had “a right to demand this kingdom,” a statement followed by enthusiastic cheering from his soldiers. When Hamlet’s body, on lit de parade, was finally carried away, it was to a blinding bluish light directed to the audience and to a mixture of sweet electronic music and somber kettle-drums in the ominous rhythm – the distinctive short-short-shortlong – of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, known as the Destiny Symphony. The rest was darkness. This was a somberly provocative ending showing that with the arrival of the new mass media the time had become even more manipulative, more widely out of joint, than ever before. The reception of B’s Hamlet was mixed both in Sweden and abroad. Only 80% of the Dramaten seats were occupied (Steene, 2005: 693), a low figure for this theatre. B was very disappointed in the half-hearted Swedish reaction to what he considered one of his best productions (Sjögren, 2002: 182).

6. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night Composed in 1941, Long Day’s Journey into Night is O’Neill’s most memorable drama and in the opinion of many the best American drama ever written.1 When it opened at Dramaten in 1988 to celebrate the centennial of the author’s birth, it was the first and only time that B staged an O’Neill play – surprisingly, perhaps, in view of his relation to the American playwright via their common spiritual father Strindberg. About a month before the opening he told a journalist that Long Day’s Journey “has a dark downward attraction. If you finally come down to the level where the demons live who have triggered the drama, you cannot remain free of them.”2 If this seems to indicate an involvement with the theme of the play, the closing remark in the prompt script about the rehearsals suggests rather the opposite: “It was a damned finicky job. Never ended.” Many years later B denied any affinity with O’Neill and minimised his own part in the production: I have no relation to O’Neill. I took on Long Day’s Journey as a kind of loyalty toward the theatre that wished to present it in connection with its jubilee3 and above all as a loyalty to the actors who were to have important roles. […] When we got going it was as if the rehearsals managed themselves. I felt more like a rehearsal guard. (Sjögren. 2002: 428)

B’s very modest enthusiasm presumably concerned not so much the play itself. Rather, it was caused on the one hand by the fact that, unlike what he was used to, the decision to stage the play was not his own but the theatre’s, on the other by his feeling rather superfluous as a director. The last applied especially to the actor playing the part of Jamie4 who refused to follow B’s suggestions (Steene, 2005: 701). Ironically this actor was especially praised by the critics. Dramaten has a very special relationship to O’Neill. It was there that many of his plays were performed in the period when his own country 1 For an analysis of the play, see Törnqvist, 2004: 176-196. 2 Elisabeth Sörenson in Svenska Dagbladet March 20, 1988. 3 Founded in 1788, Dramaten celebrated its 200th anniversary at the time. 4 In the production he was called ‘Jim’; in order not to confuse the reader I shall here stick to O’Neill‘s name ‘Jamie.’

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seemed to turn its back on him. This was the reason why O’Neill, a few weeks before he died, told his wife Carlotta that he did not want an American theatre to do Long Day’s Journey, that he wanted it done at Dramaten “in gratitude for the excellent performances they had given his plays over the years” (Olsson, 1977: 103). Olof Molander, who had earlier been responsible for Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten was the logical person to stage the play. But when Molander’s wish that his favourite actress, Tora Teje, should play the part of Mary Tyrone was rejected, he refused to direct it. Instead the young and promising Bengt Ekerot was asked to do it. The world premiere of the posthumous drama took place on February 10, 1956. It was a formidable success, perhaps the greatest ever in Dramaten. O’Neill’s dialogue was followed almost to the letter, resulting in a performance lasting close to four and a half hours. The stage directions were on the whole adhered to. With four outstanding actors in the main roles, the audience’s interest could be equally divided between “all the four haunted Tyrones,” (O’Neill’s description in the dedication to his wife that precedes the play). The head of Dramaten at the time, Karl Ragnar Gierow, has said that the dialogue “is written in such a way that a group of actors who do not stick closely to the text will not manage the task.”5 Florence Eldridge, similarly, who did the part of Mary Tyrone in the first Broadway production, has praised O’Neill’s widow for her refusal to have a single word cut. “The more one worked on the play,” Eldridge (1979: 287) said, “the more one realised that it was a symphony. Each character had a theme and the ‘repetitions’ were the variations on the themes.” However, the play is now not as sacrosanct as it was in 1956, and in his 1988 production B neglected virtually all O’Neill’s stage directions and omitted quite a lot of the dialogue, reducing the playing time with about an hour and a half (Steene, 2005:701). Cathleen’s, the servant’s, part was considerably shortened. The initial pig story was deleted.6 The literary allusions were largely limited to the antithesis between Tyrone’s Shakespeare and Edmund’s Nietzsche. Although some of the 1912 atmosphere and some of the Irish fragrance thereby disappeared, none of the critics found these omissions harmful. Instead B focussed on the central and, for the Swedish audience, truly intelligible aspects of the play.

5 Svenska Dagbladet, Feb. 16, 1972. 6 For the thematic significance of this story in relation to the main action, see Törnqvist, 1969: 241ff.

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The translation was also revised in other ways. The Swedish translator sometimes ‘directs’ the play by italicising certain words in the dialogue; such italics are ignored in the production script. Changes in the Swedish target language, especially its slang, in the decades since 1956 called for certain updatings. In contrast to the realistic world premiere, B presented an existential, stylised version of the play. This appeared most significantly in the extremely sparse scenery, designed by Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss,7 which combined cinematic effects with theatrical ones. Instead of a recognisable New England living room, the audience was faced with a black ‘raft’ – a square, raised stage, sloping toward the auditorium – suggesting that darkness surrounded this living room just as “our little life is rounded with a sleep,” one of Tyrone’s many Shakespeare quotations. The blackness of O’Neill’s back parlour had, as it were, been extended. The raft could also be seen as a jetty, the two columns at the back of the stage corresponding to piles or a dock. It was by jumping from a dock that once tried to commit suicide. The stage thus in a sense visualised the past which, in her words, is “the present” and “the future, too.” From another point of view the scenery could be compared to the black interior of an old-fashioned, funnel-shaped gramophone. The image director and scene designer had in mind was an acoustic box, where every whisper could be heard. Similarly, the practical idea behind the limited, raised stage was to have the actors come closer to the audience, thereby increasing the intimacy of the play. In the last act, B took the audience outdoors to a stylised version of the veranda of the Monte Cristo cottage, the O’Neill summer home in New London, Connecticut, on which the setting of the play is modeled.8 O’Neill’s unity of space was hereby abolished. The new, outdoor setting, especially the worn green floor of the veranda, visually transferred Edmund’s wish that he had been born a fish and his concomitant longing for death by water – as well as the feelings of all the Tyrones that they are lost in a fog. The impression to be communicated was that of a human aquarium. B’s version was suggestive not least in its sparse, filmic use of projections. First the façade of the Monte Cristo summer house was seen, dreamlike in its low-angle perspective, as though floating in the air: exterior and interior, 7 The information concerning the stage design in the following is based on my interview with the scene designer in May, 1988. 8 The photo of the veranda with the young Eugene, his brother Jamie, and his father James was reproduced in the theatre program.

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mask and face in one and the same stage picture. Then a projection of the window in the spare room, where Mary’s relapse took place, that is, a visualisation of what was on the mind of the men. After that a projection of a closed double doorway, indicating how the family seemed locked up with one another. Subsequently, a grotesquely big greenish wallpaper inviting the audience to enter the fantasy world of the four characters as they succumbed to dreams and drunkenness. Then again the exterior of the house, now behind drifting spells of fog. Finally a projection of the wallpaper once more, now in cold, blue light. To the left on the raised stage there was a worn brown armchair (a quotation from the 1956 production), to the right a round table, surrounded by four chairs of different shape: four different human fates. Largely abstaining from atmospheric light, B had the characters brightly illuminated throughout the performance, as though they were put on a dissecting table or exposed to X-rays. The lighting visualised both their attempts to get at the naked truth with each other and their feeling of being painfully stripped of their own consoling masks. There was an ironical reference to the façade mentality in the classical Greek (imitation) column which later was shown to hide a cocktail cabinet, a piece of property related especially to the three men’s tendency to embellish their weaknesses. Another column, on which a Madonna and a votive candle had been placed, visualised both Mary‘s and the men’s inclination to cling to an empty faith. Empty, because when the stage was revolved in the latter part of the performance, the sculpture was shown to be not three-dimensional as one would have expected, but flat and provided with a support at the back. In a wider, existential sense, the Greek column with its Dionysian content (the liquor) was an ironic reference to Edmund’s alias O’Neill’s Nietzschean craving for a rebirth of the Greek spirit, the Greek sense of tragedy, whereas the Holy Virgin represented an alternative, Catholic faith. The four characters were doomed to move restlessly between these two symbolic cornerstones of western civilisation, both turned hollow. Toward the end the four were seen in resigned, frozen positions, waiting for death. The inclusion of a worshipped Virgin Mary in the scenery visualised both Tyrone’s Irish-based Catholicism and, especially, Mary’s attempt to gain back her lost faith. At the same time, the sculpture was a reminder of the men’s worship of the Virgin’s namesake, their wife or mother. Significantly, their discovery of Mary’s relapse into morphine addiction more or less coincided with the audience’s discovery that the back of the sculpture was hollow.

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In the play text there is an interesting contrast between the four somewhat dissociated lamps in the living room, representing the living present, and the five ‘united’ front parlour bulbs reminding us of the harmony that might have been; that is, the harmony between all the Tyrones including the dead child Eugene, who is very present in their minds. Abstaining from this lamp symbolism, B nevertheless retained it in a way by opening his performance with a little pantomime. The four Tyrones slowly entered the black platform, formed a group, a tableau vivant, in which each of them touched his or her neighbour, a group suggesting closeness, intimacy, tenderness, love. Then the group dissolved and the play began. In the subsequent action the four were never again seen in harmonious togetherness. At most there were brief moments of tenderness and love between individual members of the family. The end, designed as a contrast to the initial togetherness, showed the four spread out, isolated from each other; they then disappeared in different directions, as if on their lonely way to death. When Edmund, in the last act, tries to tell his father of his pantheistic experiences at sea, he does so in a manner which indicates that, contrary to what he himself claims, he has more than the makings of a poet in him. Edmund’s monologue could be recreated as a desperate attempt to establish contact with his father or, on the contrary, as a pseudo-soliloquy, the reverie of someone lost in a dream, forgetful of the fact that he has a listener. In either case his poetical nature would be stressed by the very fact that the speech seems spontaneous. By having Edmund read bits of his monologue aloud from his notebook, B made the poetical nature of the speech more plausible and indicated furthermore that the audience was confronted with a burgeoning writer. Moreover, by having Edmund read the key sentence of the monologue – “It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish.” – from his notebook,9 B indicated that this was not a sudden emotional outburst, but a persistent feeling of alienation. Edmund was, as it were, letting his father in on the secrets of his private diary. Edmund’s part is perhaps the most difficult one in the play. He has less of a past, less of a profile than the other family members. This might be because, unlike the others, he is “more sinned against than sinning” (Raleigh, 1965: 92). At the same time, being the most balanced of the four, he is the one we can most easily identify with. In B’s version, Tyrone was a big, boisterous child, in need of a mother, as his first entrance together with Mary clarified. He was also a man who 9 Cf. B’s remark in the prompt script at this point: “This is the song, the centre, and the focus. Edmund is standing with closed eyes, the book against his breast. Stillness.”

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was play-acting at home, as though this was just another stage on which to perform. Tyrone’s spontaneity and fighting spirit were stressed. In the last act he was costumed, not as O’Neill has it in “an old brown dressing gown,” indicating his stinginess, but in an elegant dressing gown that bore witness to his glorious past as an actor. His slippers, by contrast, were old-fashioned and ugly. His discordant costume testified to his split nature. His long confessional monologue brought out the need of a somewhat naïve man to justify himself to his more mature younger son. The focal character in the play, Mary, was dressed according to the fashion in 1912. She wore a violet dress throughout most of the play, with a grey, foggy tint to it. The colour ironically linked her with the whore of the play, Fat Violet. At the end her nightgown suggested the dress of a nun. When Mary leaves her three men, handing her bridal gown back to her husband, the family loses its centre and binding force; this is why her relapse into morphinism is so fatal for all of them. O’Neill has here created one of the most striking moments in twentieth-century drama, since it fuses past, present, and future for all the four Tyrones in a pregnant visual image. B’s Mary was more robust than her predecessor at Dramaten, the frail and oversensitive Inga Tidblad. Like B’s Tyrone, she at times seemed to be acting a part. Jamie’s sarcastic comment on Mary’s final entrance – “The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!” – was cut. Presumably B found it disturbingly explicit – especially since the Stockholm audience might see a connection between his barefoot Ophelia in his production of Hamlet two years earlier and his, at this moment, barefoot Mary. The most impressive of the four characters, several critics found, was the elder brother Jamie. Unlike his histrionically talented father, Jamie is merely a ham-actor. As in several of his films, B here utilised the contrast between respected stage actors and discriminated clowns. His Jamie, the least loved of the four family members, was hiding his true self behind the mask of a grinning clown. Behind his vulgar Broadway wise-guy appearance, Jamie showed a sensitive human being, more probing than any of the other Tyrones. B’s version was very much an attempt to bring out the classical tragedy that is hidden behind the naturalistic surface layer of Long Day’s Journey. In a way it was a reply to O’Neill’s worrying question in 1931: “Is it possible to get modern psychological approximation of Greek sense of fate […], which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by?” (Halfmann, 1987: 86). The production of Long Day’s Journey was an attempt to provide a viable answer to O’Neill’s fundamental question.

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What in theatre language is called blocking, i.e. determining the positions and movements of the actors on the stage, in drama theory is referred to as proxemics, a term for what is rarely indicated in the stage directions of drama text and amply and much more precisely in a stage performance. As always with B, the prompt script is full of drawings indicating blockings. Proxemic character relations between people taking part in a dramatic/theatrical event can be of three kinds: (1) character-character, (2) character-spectator, (3) spectator-spectator. In the following, I shall focus on (1), deal indirectly with (2) and disregard (3). The proxemic relationship between character(s) and character(s) can be defined (a) as the distance at any given moment between the characters, and (b) as the nature of this distance. The distance between people, it has been suggested (Elam, 1980: 65), can be categorised into four groups: intimate (physical contact or near-contact), personal (1 1/2 inch-4 feet or 4 cm-1.2 m), social (4-12 feet or 1.2 m-3.6 m) and public (12-25 feet or 3.6-7.5 m). The nature of the distance can, for example, be above-below, next to, in front of-behind, turned to-turned away from. It will indirectly involve the characters’ location on the stage (stage zones), their positions (standing, sitting, lying), their relationship to scenery and properties, etc. The distance between the characters must also, of course, be seen in relation to their attitude to each other at any given moment, to what they say and do not say to each other. The proxemics can either support or contradict verbalised attitudes (Fischer-Lichte, 1992: 93). We may further speak of static or dynamic proxemics. In all cases the proxemics are from the spectator’s point of view. O’Neill’s habit of ‘directing’ his own plays via ample stage directions make comparisons between proxemic character relations in his drama texts and in performances based on them possible to an extent that by far exceeds the plays by most other playwrights. This is especially true when comparisons concern performances which remain faithful to the author’s dialogue, while the blocking differs from what is prescribed or suggested in his stage directions. B’s performance combined a highly stylised setting with selectively realistic acting, often bordering on choreographic patterning. His living room had only imaginary walls. Unlike O’Neill, he placed the window-wall not to the right but in the proscenium opening, so that Mary‘s symbolic comments on the fog were made in a frontal, very visible position, comparable to a cinematic close-up. His characters grouped themselves with regard to one another in ways which often opposed the realistic demand for verisimilitude in a striving to visualise their state of mind. Thus Mary and Edmund at one point were sitting next to one another on the floor, like two little children. At the end of Act II.2, where Mary feels desperately lonely, O’Neill indicates

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her state of mind by having her stand by the table, “one hand drumming on it, the other fluttering up to pat her hair.” This is a subtle way of suggesting, in the realistic mode, Mary’s ambivalent emotions toward her family. B, by contrast, had her lie down on the floor to express more emphatically her feelings of debasement at this point. An advantage of stylised character proxemics compared to realistic ones is that it is easier to establish a spatial pattern or leitmotif throughout a performance. Thus Mary’s desperately low position, just referred to, pointed back to a situation preceding it; sitting on the floor close to Edmund she at one point stretched her arms upwards while expressing her longing for the Blessed Virgin. At the same time it pointed forward to Jamie’s corpse-like position on the floor in the last act as well as to her own falling to the floor at the end. Similarly, by having Mary kneeling first to Edmund, then to Tyrone, finally to Virgin Mary, B made this position an integral part of a choreographic pattern visualising Mary’s turning away from family communion in search of virginal separateness. Already in the opening of his performance, B emphasised the significance of the proxemic character relations. A transcription of the opening moments might read as follows: Sound of foghorn. Lights up. Tilted projection of a house exterior on the cyclorama. On a black, raised square platform two low ‘columns’ can be seen at the back, the left one with a sculpture of Virgin Mary on top, the right one topped by a Greek capital. Downstage an armchair left, a table, and four chairs of different shape right. mary enters from left. Behind her, tyrone enters with folded arms. jamie enters from right, his hands in his pockets. Behind him edmund. The four form a group in the middle of the room. The three men – tyrone to the left, edmund in the middle, jamie to the right – face mary who stands between tyrone and edmund. mary, turning her back to the audience, faces them. Her left hand reaches out for tyrone’s right hand, her right hand for edmund’s right hand. edmund puts his left arm around jamie’s shoulder. jamie keeps both hands in his pockets. They remain completely still for a moment. Far left, outside the family group and the platform, cathleen, the second housemaid, stands waiting with a tray.

O’Neill singles out the “varnished oak rocker [...] at right front of table” from the three “wicker armchairs” close to it. The oak rocker represents the sturdy nature of the pater familias – only he sits in it – while the three wicker chairs

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represent the other family members. The round table suggests ‘democratic’ family communion. The distance of the rocker from the table is an indication of the mental distance between Tyrone and the other three. By placing four chairs around the family table and by giving each of them a different shape, B made it clear that these chairs represent “all the four [...] Tyrones.” At the same time the director retained the idea of positioning one chair away from the table. But unlike O’Neill’s rocker, B’s armchair was occupied not only by Tyrone but also by the other family members. While O’Neill thus opts for a realistic division – separating the father from the other three – B’s division, emphasising that constant flux between separateness and communion was applicable to all the Tyrones – and, obliquely, to human relations generally. While O’Neill has his four characters enter from the same direction – quite logically since they have just had breakfast together in the dining room – B had husband and wife enter from one direction and the sons from another. In this way it was suggested from the very beginning that the older generation was mentally separated from the younger one. Yet very soon the four, as we have seen, formed a close-knit family group of tenderness and love. In this group Mary was singled out as the pivotal figure by her central position opposite the three men. While Tyrone and Jamie both took complementary self-contained positions – the former an authoritarian, the latter a nonchalantly insubordinate one – Mary and Edmund showed gestural compassion. There was no physical contact between Tyrone and Mary on the one hand and Jamie on the other. Edmund bridged, as it were, the distance between the parents and Jamie. In the rest of the performance the audience witnessed how Edmund was embraced by the other three family members; how Tyrone and Mary embraced each other as well as Edmund; and how Jamie was embraced only by Edmund. Taking embracement as a proxemic signifier, we may from this conclude that the two brothers in their inter-human relations were at polar ends, Edmund being the most, Jamie the least loved member of the family. The initial tableau vivant – the foghorn already here provided an ominous background ‘music’ – thus very precisely anticipated in nuce what was soon to be enacted at length and in detail. It functioned in other words as a proxemic image of the fundamental family relations, providing the audience with an Erwartungshorizont vis-à-vis the drama-to-come. The tableau could be interpreted in different ways. It could be seen as a pose, a façade, an expression of how the family tried to keep up appearances, a sign of how it wished to be seen by others; their momentary immobility was akin to that of a group posing for a photographer. It could be seen as an expression of wish-fulfilment, indicating their common dream of how

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everything might have been. Or it could be seen as an image of how love bound the four together despite the menacing sound of the foghorn which seemed to warn that the harmony between the four was brittle and soon to be disturbed. The harmonious grouping was established again in the early part of Act I. The relevant lines read: mary. [...] But I did truly have beautiful hair once, didn’t I, James? tyrone. The most beautiful in the world! mary. It was a rare shade of reddish brown and so long it came down below my knees. You ought to remember it, too, Jamie.

When these lines are spoken O’Neill indicates by means of mimicry that there is a rapport between Tyrone and Jamie on the one hand and Mary on the other: Mary‘s face “lights up with a charming, shy embarrassment” and “there is an old boyish charm in [jamie’s] loving smile at his mother.” It is by means of such facial kinesics that O’Neill tries to suggest that both Mary and Jamie at this point revert to an earlier and happier stage in their life. It is debatable, however, whether such subtle changes alone can suggest to a spectator what O’Neill makes plain to the reader: that Mary is now “the girl she has once been.” Sensing this, B provided Mary with an old photo album. Tyrone and Jamie gathered on either side of her to look at the young girl – her happy, innocent past self – visible in the album. Again the proxemics underlined the central position of the wife/mother in the family. As designed by B, the emphatic grouping of the characters at this point indicated that the harmony of the initial family union was still retained, be it with some effort: Edmund, whose illness by now seemed worrying to everyone, no longer joined the others. In Act III, O’Neill again places Mary in the middle, now between Tyrone and Edmund. But this time her position becomes highly ironical, since both we and they know that Mary has relapsed into morphinism and, as we are soon to learn, that Edmund seems doomed to an early death from tuberculosis. Mary’s middle position now contrasts strongly with her seemingly non-caring attitude to Edmund: she avoids the issue of his health. She has ceased to be the binding force in the family she once was; her “leave-taking” has begun. B here followed O’Neill. In the ending Mary’s moving away from the three men is indicated in the drama text not only in her radically changed outward appearance but also by striking proxemic, mimic, gestic and paralinguistic signifiers:

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[mary] comes into the room, the wedding gown trailing on the floor. [...] [tyrone] gets to his feet and stands directly in her path [...]. She lets him take [the wedding gown]. [...] She moves back from tyrone [...]. He sinks back on his chair, holding the wedding gown in his arms with an unconscious clumsy, protective gentleness.

While Jamie recites from Swinburne’s “A Leave-taking,” She moves like a sleepwalker, around the back of jamie’s chair, then forward toward left front, passing behind edmund. [...] She moves left to the front end of the sofa beneath the windows and sits down, facing front, her hands folded in her lap, in a demure schoolgirlish pose.10

This is the only time in the drama text that anyone sits down far away from the family table. Mary’s separation from the others could hardly have been suggested more markedly. The men immediately recognise her separation and act accordingly: jamie pushes the bottle toward [tyrone]. He pours a drink without disarranging the wedding gown he holds carefully over his other arm and on his lap, and shoves the bottle back. jamie pours his and passes the bottle to edmund, who, in turn, pours one. tyrone lifts his glass and his sons follow suit mechanically, but before they can drink mary speaks and they slowly lower their drinks to the table, forgetting them.

After Mary’s concluding monologue – or soliloquy, since she now seems totally unaware of the three men – the final stage directions confirm that the separation is lethal to all the Tyrones: She stares before her in a sad dream. tyrone stirs in his chair. edmund and jamie remain motionless.

Mary’s returning her wedding gown to her husband signifies her ‘separation’ from him and from their married life. She has reverted to the time before she met Tyrone, to the time when she dreamed of becoming a nun and of separating herself from the world. In the closing moments “the past,” Mary says in the play’s key line, “is the present.” The action has come full circle. 10 A ms. drawing by O’Neill, showing Mary’s proxemics at the end, is found in Törnqvist, 1969: 143.

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B’s version of the ending differed significantly from O’Neill’s: The three men, all of them in drunken stupor, are spread out over the stage [representing the veranda of the house]. tyrone is sitting to the left, jamie in the middle, edmund to the right. mary enters from left with the wedding gown trailing on the floor. tyrone gets up and entreats mary to give it to him so as not to soil it. She moves over to him and does so. She then moves to jamie, finally to Edmund. Close to edmund she takes a frontal position and utters her soliloquy. When she recalls how Mother Elizabeth had refused to let her become a nun, she falls on her bottom to the floor. tyrone and jamie stir. edmund gets up and helps her to his chair, where she concludes her soliloquy. When she mentions the Blessed Virgin, edmund moves back to the sculpture of Virgin Mary. The foghorn is heard. mary concludes her soliloquy: “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.” edmund and tyrone stir, jamie remains motionless. mary gets up from the chair and exits left. Lights out. jamie out right, tyrone out left. A radiant tree is double-projected on the cyclorama. edmund comes back to the table, picks up his black notebook and disappears right. Curtain.

One of the critics noticed that Mary, in her and the play’s final line, stressed the word “time” – “as if the sum of her bitter and sad life was to be found in that word” (Jarl W. Donnér in Sydsvenska Dagbladet). By emphasising this word Mary made it clear that her happiness had been only “for a time.” B’s ending was clearly choreographed as a contrast to the initial togetherness. The grouping was now that of four separate individuals. The family unity had been dissolved. The four chairs around the table in the living room had been replaced by three separate chairs – for the men – on the veranda. With one chair missing, there was only the floor for Mary to sit on. While O’Neill indicates her separateness from the men horizontally, B did it vertically. Her falling flop down became an ironical comment on the discrepancy between her aspiring dreams and prosaic down-to-earth reality. Abstaining from quoting “A Leave-taking” – which probably seemed both too explicit and too pathetic to him – B retained Mary’s proxemic leave-taking of each of her men. Omitting the drinking on their part at the end, he kept its essential element: the drunken stupor, which turned the men into immobile corpses. This also had the advantage that it created a stillness around Mary’s soliloquy that enabled the audience to focus on it all the more. The performance ended – as it began – with a highly stylised tableau vivant, or rather, a tableau mourant. One after the other

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the characters left the black platform, by now clearly representing the raft of life, and departed into the surrounding darkness – as we are all doomed once to leave this life alone on our “journey into night.” In B’s existential version this was the final leave-taking. Or so it would have been, were it not that B at the very end added a significant visual epilogue. The radiant tree, which summarised what the audience had just seen enacted – the entangled net of family relations – was spatially linked with Edmund, whose alter ego thirty years later was to write Long Day’s Journey into Night. The combination of the radiant tree, the notebook, and Edmund seemed to imply that out of this entangled situation a soul was being born. This again seemed to indicate that what the audience had seen enacted had been in remembrance of things past on the part of Edmund, who now appeared to be a link between the two O’Neills: the young experiencer of his family situation in 1912 and the ageing ‘diarist’ of it in 1941.11 Especially at the end the claim for “deep pity and understanding for all the four haunted Tyrones,” could be intensely shared by the spectators, reminding them perhaps that they had been confronted with a family constellation identical with the first family of mankind. The production was on the whole enthusiastically received but some critics had a problem with the actor doing Edmund, while, as previously mentioned, the actor doing Jamie was especially lauded. There were guest performances in Bergen, Rome, Paris and New York.

11 This interpretation presupposes a certain familiarity about the author on the part of the audience. A substantial article in the theatre program by Stig Torsslow about the biographical background for the play provided essential information in this respect, as did O’Neill’s dedication to his wife Carlotta, this too reprinted in the program.

7.

Yukio Mishima, Madame de Sade

Those who visited one of B’s stage performances of Yukio Mishima’s play Madame de Sade, opening at the Small Stage of Dramaten on April 8, 1989,1 could via the theatre program be informed both about the author, the play, and the life and work of its absent central figure, Marquis DonatienAlphonse-François de Sade (1740-1814). They could learn that what most people take to be the name of the Japanese writer – characteristically the name of a noble samurai family – is actually a pseudonym for Kimitaké Hiraoka (1925-70).2 The theatre program quotes Mishima‘s post-face to the American translation of the play: Reading The Life of the Marquis de Sade by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa I was most intrigued as a writer, by the riddle of why the Marquise de Sade, after having demonstrated such absolute fidelity to her husband during his long years in prison, should have left him the moment that he was at last free. This riddle served as the point of departure for my play, which is an attempt to provide a logical solution. I was sure that something highly incomprehensible, yet highly truthful, about human nature lay behind this riddle […]. This play might be described as “Sade seen through women’s eyes.” I was obliged therefore to place Madame de Sade at the centre, and to consolidate the theme by assigning all the other parts to women. Madame de Sade stands for wifely devotion; her mother, Madame de Montreuil, for law, society, and morality; Madame de Simiane for religion; Madame de Saint-Fond for carnal desires; Anne, the younger sister of Madame de Sade, for feminine guilelessness and lack of principles; and the servant Charlotte for the common people. I had to involve these characters with Madame de Sade and make them revolve around her, with something like the motion of the planets. I felt obliged to dispense entirely with the usual, 1 The play had earlier been produced at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki in 1970, in a translation by Bo Carpelan and directed by Karl-Axel Heiknert. A guest performance at Dramaten took place in 1970. B did not see it. 2 What the program did not mention is that Mishima visited Stockholm in 1967. He then brought with him Madame de Sade, obviously in the hope that B would be willing to produce it. But the two never met (Christina Palmgren Rosenqvist, Vi, 1989, 17: 41). Three years later Mishima died.

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trivial stage effects, and to control the action exclusively by the dialogue; collisions of ideas had to create the shape of the drama, and sentiments had to be paraded throughout in the garb of reason. (Mishima, 1967: 107)

This is an important clue to this all-women play,3 especially in its indication that the characters are primarily incarnations of conflicting ideologies. But it is questionable whether the author has managed to provide a logical answer to Madame de Sade’s final volte-face. The implication is that not until she has seen herself portrayed in her husband’s novel Justine4 can she reject him.5 Is her rejection of her husband at the end an apostasy or a renaissance?6 Either interpretation is both dramaturgically and ideologically problematic, since it means that the heroine joins the despicable established fold in her view that her husband is a monster. But if we, in this ‘allegorical’ play, see her as a representative of latter-day mankind, her late conversion makes sense. If we see de Sade as a figure whose life coincides not only with a radically increased freedom on the part of humanity concomitant with a fast technical development, soon leading to the breakthrough of industrialism; if we further realise that for a long time this freedom and technical development have been regarded as benevolent for mankind – until, with the arrival of the atom bomb, a negative view began to emerge; so that now it seems “logical” to arrive at the view that the development since the time of de Sade will land us not in a paradise but in a hell. This, it could be argued, is de Sade’s representative role of being “God’s miscarriage” and “aborted foetus.” And this is what the expression “Alphonse is myself!”7 apparently means, a line Mishima provocatively hands over to the audience for self-identification. Seen in this way, Renée de Sade – a contradictory blend of Christian name and surname – is significantly the title character and her realisation at the end that she has been betrayed by her husband for a very long time becomes painfully applicable to us all. 3 Four years earlier B had staged Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the Residenztheater in Munich, a drama in which, B said, “four women fight for a cadaver” (Timm, 1994: 140), a rather apt description of Mishima’s play. 4 The title character’s name is derived from Latin justus (righteous). 5 The situation is quite similar to that in Strindberg’s To Damascus II, where the Lady is forbidden by the Stranger to read his hateful book about the marriage between him and his first wife. When she does so, their relationship receives a blow – but it holds. B staged To Damascus I-II at Dramaten in 1974. 6 The name Renée is derived from Latin renatus (regenerated). 7 “Alphonse” is what the women call de Sade rather than Donatien, his first name. Perhaps the similarity between Alphonse and Adolf, in French Adolphe, the Christian name of the foremost icon of evil in our time, has played a role.

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In his post-face, Mishima also comments on the semi-documentary nature of his play: I have in several instances deliberately altered facts in the lives of the historical characters of the play. These changes were dictated by theatrical necessity. […] Of the six characters, Madame de Sade, Madame de Montreuil, and Madame de Sade’s sister, Anne, are historical; the other three were created by myself. (Mishima, 1967: 108)

The chronology of Marquis de Sade included in the theatre program provides further examples of deviations from historical reality. Thus de Sade’s three children with Renée, all born before 1772, are never mentioned or even indicated. And whereas Renée’s sister Anne in the play is still alive in 1790 and is married, her real counterpart was never married and died already in 1781. De Sade’s novel Justine exists in three versions, each bolder than the one before. The first was completed in 1787 but not published until 1930. The second was published in 1791. The third was completed in 1797. In the play Renée reads the novel in 1790 and Madame de Simiane, by implication, already in 1772. In at least one respect Mishima relies on a period view different from ours. In the 18th century, the theatre program informs us, “an erotic relationship with a sister-in-law was regarded as incest. Madame de Montreuil could never forgive de Sade that Anne had become his mistress.” Set in France in the autumn of 1772 (Act I), in September 1778 (Act II), and in April 1790 (Act III), the play describes both a socio-ideological and a corresponding seasonal development. Undoubtedly in conformance with the Japanese original, the American version of the play contains relatively few stage directions. Photographs from the first production – at Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo in 1965 – reveal that the same French 18th century scenery was retained throughout and that the costumes were all attuned to the rococo period; Countess de Saint-Fond’s “riding habit,” for example, consisted of a hat and a long, billowing dress. None of the women carried a fan. B’s theatre program opened with a kind of thematic declaration: a lesbian engraving from de Sade’s Justine, showing six naked women, four of them having sex with one another, one couple lustfully a tergo, another sado-masochistically; a third waiting for their turn. The room carries connotations of aristocracy and learnedness. Matching this engraving were close-ups of the six actresses of the performance. In this way naked female bodies, all similar, were combined and contrasted with female faces of

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different kinds and with different expressions. The close-ups were preceded by a photograph of the inside of an anonymous hand pointing to the right – as if the director was introducing his cast.8 The engraving was followed by a poem by the prominent 20th century Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf,9 beginning: Each human being is a world, peopled by blind creatures rebelling against the royal I that rules them. (My transl.)

This was clearly a hint of how to interpret the performance where, in addition to the verbal descriptions of de Sade’s perversities, including those with Renée, the audience was confronted with Anne‘s ‘incestuous’ relationship with him, Countess de Saint-Fond‘s lesbianism, and Madame de Simiane‘s and Charlotte’s probable past erotic relationship with Saint-Fond and their titillating interest in Justine. Even Madame de Montreuil could be included in the list. When she put her hand on her daughter’s breast, the audience were made to understand “that the source of the perversion [was] perhaps not only the infamous libertine de Sade” (Ellefsen in Dagens Nyheter). The playing time of B’s production was about two hours and a quarter. There were two intermissions. The director slightly changed the seasonal progression into late summer (Act I), autumn (Act II), and winter/early spring (Act III). He also implicitly extended the historical period to our own time by having Saint-Fond’s riding habit in Act I look decidedly modern and by having Anne in Act III appear in fur coat and smoke cigarettes as if she belonged to la belle époque; the costumes and setting of this act in fact recalled less the French 1789 revolution than the Russian 1917 one (Andréason in Göteborgs-Posten). The simple setting, designed by Charles Koroly “with little signs quoted from the author’s cultural background” (Zern in Dagens Nyheter), remained spatially the same in all acts – Madame de Sade’s salon – yet changed its character in conformance with changes in the mental climate between the six women. “From the Japan-inspired first act with a cherry tree projected between the columns in the background it 8 The modern shirt cuff on the wrist suggests that it is the hand of the director. Rokem (2000: 118ff.) points out that Marquis de Sade plays a part in the performance comparable to that of the director in his combination of visual absence and strong impact. Sjöman (2001: 306f.) reminds us that the situation in the play is the same as in B’s film About All These Women, where we never get to see the main male figure, only his women. 9 “To me,” B has said, “that poem represents what has kept me busy all my life […] without me being able to express it as precisely” (Sörenson in Svenska Dagbladet March 30, 1989).

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[became], in the second act, a room glowing with the lava streams of passion (the dresses are then red, pink and orange).” In the final act “they [were] marked by the chill of the revolution: clouds in the background, a soughing wind sounding like an excited mob at a distance” (Andréason). In the first two acts it was highly stylised, spacious and devoid of properties, l’ancien régime; in the third it was more realistic and crammed with furniture – as if the aristocratic characters were now, after the revolution, forced to share much less space than before. Though set in 18th century France, B’s Madame de Sade had formally much in common with Japanese nō drama, an aristocratic form of drama that strongly appealed to Mishima and at which he himself had earlier tried his hand. In nō drama, where all the parts are played by men, every motion is controlled by set rules. The costumes are rich and elaborate. A full mask and a wig are used by the protagonist, who is called shite. At the back of the stage, square in shape, there is always a painting of a pine tree. Stage properties are few, simple and highly conventionalised. The most important is the fan. The chanting of the actor is accompanied by a chorus who sometimes sing the actor’s part while he is dancing. There is also a small orchestra, comprising of a flute and various drums. The second role, called waki, functions as a mediator between the shite and the spectators who are sitting around the stage (Scott, 1966: 43-50). “Performers rely on the fact that their audience, being aware of the theatrical alphabet (kata) […] are able to recognise everything by being shown a part […]. Kata are well-established signifiers metonymically communicated to the audience” (Raz, 1983: 267). B adjusted to nō in several ways, especially in Acts I-II. Given a fairly small western picture-frame theatre, he had the stage extended over the first five rows of the auditorium to enhance actor-audience rapport; this construction could alas not be maintained when the production was touring (Marker/Marker, 1992: 315, note 12). Although he preferred a semi-circular stage, B nevertheless retained the nō square in the form of a rectangle, marking the central acting area, in a colour differing in shade from that of the floor surrounding it. The semi-circular rear wall, divided into three parts separated by broad columns, could give associations not only to Japanese nō drama but also to Greek tragedy and to Christian altar triptychs. The nō pine tree was in Act I replaced by a cherry tree in blossom, “as if fetched from a French 18th interior, à la mode japonaise” (Björkstén in Svenska Dagbladet). Like the costumes in this act, it could be seen as an indication of how reality is covered – masked(?) – by an idyllic and attractive veneer. The stage was in the first two acts devoid of any properties – except those carried by the characters (fans, riding weal, book, letter). The rococo costumes were here,

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as one could expect from women belonging to the aristocracy, exceedingly rich, in mild pastel colours, and ample use was made of fans. Incidentally subdued music on koto, the Japanese zither, could be heard. Unlike a Japanese nō director, B could not rely on any kata understood by his audience. Movements, gestures, and mimicry had to be interpreted within a western framework, mostly lacking fixed semiotic meanings. The highly stylised manner of presentation nevertheless assured a certain approximation to the Japanese style of acting. The use of the fans is a case in point. Spread to protect the bearer from sacrilegious utterances (Simiane), to bar someone off, to enable eavesdropping, to hide the truth behind formal/traditional behaviour (Montreuil, Renée) or behind a false depiction of reality (Anne), the fans functioned as masks to disguise one’s true identity. In this respect, they had their counterparts both in the voluminous, elegant dresses of Acts I-II, hiding one’s body and in the high wigs, hiding one’s hair. Like these other periodbound signifiers, the fans figured prominently in the first two acts but not at all in the revelatory third act. Contrasting with the aristocratic, embroidered costumes were those of Charlotte, the servant, and Saint-Fond, the ideological rebel and adept of de Sade. Representing the common man, Charlotte wore a simple dress. Saint-Fond’s emancipated riding costume in Act I consisted of a pale yellow tunic and pants, the latter made of chamois,10 black riding-boots, sleek dark hair, black gloves, a black riding weal in her hand. The costume indicated at once her straightforwardness, her identification with de Sade, and her lesbianism. In Act II she appeared in a more feminine guise. (Combined with her masculine appearance in Act I it seemed to indicate her androgynous nature.) Entering in a red robe and with a golden half-mask, she let Charlotte remove both. The unmasking revealed a golden dress below a deathly white face with blackened lips, an incarnation, it would seem, of her pride in daring to demonstrate that she was, as she said tongue-in-cheek, “a depraved woman.” In the first two acts, the movements and gestures of the characters were carefully designed with the help of choreographer Donya Feuer. The women oscillated between proximity and distance, contact and isolation. Simiane’s hypocritical signs of the cross in Act I were emphatically contradicted when Saint-Fond, in Act II, in accordance with the black mass she had earlier described, spread her blood-tainted arms and pierced hands to form

10 The pants were put on damp to fit the body like a glove (Bergman/Harning, 2008: 142).

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a living cross, an antichrist emblem in the sense that Christ’s prerogative to suffering seemed questioned. The key sentence “Alphonse is myself!,” first uttered by Saint-Fond, later repeated by Renée, was visually concretised and expanded in B’s handling of the book that was the primary reason for Renée’s ‘conversion’ at the end: de Sade’s Justine. In the opening, Simiane was seen reading a small, black book. After a little while she put it inside her dress. Considering her Catholicism, soon to be proclaimed in the form of repeated signs of the cross, the spectator at this point would assume that the book was a religious book of some sort. When Saint-Fond, who had obviously not only read Justine but also been deeply influenced by it, a little later mentioned the number of whippings de Sade gave and received from a naked woman – 215, 179, 225, 240 – Simiane immediately added this up to 859. She was already familiar with the number because – this was the implication – she had just read the passage Saint-Fond referred to. In other words, the book Simiane was reading in the beginning was Justine.11 Eighteen years later Renée has read the book. At the opening of Act III she was seen reading it. A little later she showed the most perverse pages to Simiane, not realising that Simiane was already acquainted with it. Instead of being titillated, Renée was shocked by the book because it was so recognisable to her. She shunned this direct confrontation with Adolphe in herself. Like Simiane, she now sought protection in the bosom of the Church by becoming a nun. Her rejection of de Sade was demonstrated in action when she threw his book to the floor – where it, in a brief epilogue added by B, was first kicked by Charlotte (the official attitude), then picked up and carried away by her. Representing at once the third estate – the common man – and the revolution, Charlotte had little reason to reject Justine which, after all, was a testimony to aristocratic perversity. Embracing the book, one critic remarked, “a Bible for the time to come” […], she [went] to meet the centuries that will be hers” (Bo Lundin in Göteborgs-Tidningen). The printed word, it has been said, propelled the French revolution. Also in this capacity B’s Justine was emblematic. Justine, Renée tells Simiane, is about two sisters, Juliette and Justine. The former devotes herself to depravity, the latter defends her virtue. Nonetheless, Juliette is rewarded, Justine punished. It is easy to recognise the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32) as the paragon for this description of 11 Cf. B’s remark in the prompt script: “We must never get rid of Simiane’s enormous craving and passion.”

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worldly injustice. In Mishima’s play, Anne, the younger sister plays the part of the prodigal son, and Renée, the older sister, the part of his virtuous brother. B immediately demonstrated Anne’s selfish narcissism by means of a mirror sequence. The mirror, placed between Anne and the audience, was purely imaginary; from Anne’s movements and gestures the spectators could conclude that she was mirroring herself. The most obvious expansion with regard to the text concerned the servant, Charlotte. Like Mishima’s, B’s Charlotte underwent a striking change from adjustment to her superiors in Act I to subdued revolt against them in Act III. This change was indicated both in her movements – her anxious hurrying to assist them in Act I was replaced by an almost lethargic attitude in Act III – and in her way of addressing them. But whereas Mishima has her enter and exit in agreement with her servant role, B had her remain in the visualised space virtually throughout the performance. Frequently eavesdropping behind a pillar to what the other women said and did, she was the only character who experienced the complete action. As such, she was, like the waki, a mediator between stage and audience, a representative of the voyeurs on the other side of the stage. Also in this sense the symbolic part allotted to her by the author – that of the common man – was meaningfully secured. The play opens with Simiane and Saint-Fond waiting in Montreuil’s salon after having been summoned by her to use their influence to get her son-in-law, the Marquis de Sade, out of prison. Both ladies pledged their help, Simiane using her contacts in the church and Saint-Fond her circle of lovers. Soon Renée arrives and we learn that the Marquis has escaped from prison and been on the run for months. B’s curtainless performance opened with an empty stage, representing Madame de Montreuil’s salon, and with subdued koto music. Lights came up encircling part of the red rectangular carpet indicating the central acting area. Charlotte entered followed by Simiane, whom she had obviously received at the front door and now showed the way in. After curtseying to the visiting Baroness she made her exit. Waiting for Madame de Montrueil to appear Simiane took up the little book, earlier identified as Justine, and began to read. Charlotte soon returned to usher in a second visitor, the Countess de Saint-Fond. She too was greeted with the servant’s humble curtseying. Saint-Fond immediately began to complain that although Montreuil had herself invited her, she now kept her waiting. Showing her irritation at this possibly class-determined manner – a marquise ranks higher than a countess – by impatiently walking back and forth, her restless

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behaviour starkly contrasted with Simiane’s static hiding herself behind her book as if it was a fan. Saint-Fond’s complaint was frontally addressed to the audience rather than to the two women on the stage. It was in essence a thinking aloud, supported by the spread-out positions of the three women at this moment, accentuating the isolation of all three. A fairly early sequence in Act I, in which four of the six women are present, describes how de Sade was burnt in effigie; it was staged as follows: On the stage are simiane left, saint-fond and montreuil right. In the background charlotte. montreuil. […] Since the accused [de Sade] was absent and his whereabouts unknown, his portrait was burned at the stake. All frontal. charlotte walks to extreme right, stops there. Although I was here in Paris myself, I could see the flames licking at the gentle smile and blond hair of my son-in-law’s portrait, while the mob cheered… simiane. This was perhaps the first glimpse of the fire of hell in our world. saint-fond. The crowd must have been screaming: “Pile on the fire!” – “Make it burn!” And the fire was only the jealousy people felt for all the vices they themselves were unable of. montreuil. “Pile on the fire!” – What would we do, if shouts and screams reached all the way here? I’ve heard that some of the rabble shrieked my daughter’s name, and even mine. simiane. “Pile on the fire!” – It must have been a purifying fire. When the Marquis’ portrait was burned, his sins were atoned for. saint-fond. “Pile on the fire!” – The whips of flame lashed brutally at his pale cheeks and blond hair. Two hundred fifteen, one hundred seventynine… I’m convinced the portrait was smiling. saint-fond turns her head and faces right.

Simiane’s religious belief in a purifying fire – she sides with the inquisition – contrasts both with Saint-Fond’s contempt of the fire and conviction that de Sade in effigy would condescendingly smile at it and with Montreuil’s egoistic fear for her own life. In Mishima’s text, this passage lacks stage directions. As often when anxious not to distract the audience from what was being said, B turned it into a very immobile sequence. Act II opened with Anne’s showing Renée a letter that proved that Alphonse was to be released from the prison. Rejoicing at the good news, the two sisters sat down on the floor and lovingly embraced each other as if

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they were children again.12 But when Renée said that Alphonse (like another Don Juan) always pursued the unattainable and was therefore unable to love anyone, not even Anne, Anne withdrew from her sister’s caresses and took revenge by asking Renée, in the third person: “Not my sister either?” The blissful moment of union was gone. A little later Saint-Fond revealed that Alphonse’s freedom had been of short duration and that he was back in jail. Although Anne had known this for quite some time, she had not told Renée about it. Anne had in other words been playing a cruel game with her sister who, after all, was her rival for Alphonse’s love. In Act II the hitherto more or less disguised controversy between Montreuil and Renée flares up. Siding with her husband, the daughter openly accuses her mother– and here Montreuil’s allegorical role is particularly obvious – of being morally corrupt. This controversy, by which the second act concludes, was presented as follows: montreuil is standing at extreme left, renée at extreme right. montreuil […] I have no intention of being burned at the stake. renée. And I don’t intend to die like a genteel whore with her mite saved up against old age. montreuil screams. Renée! Agitated. I could slap you! Moves from right to center renée moves left, kneels before montreuil. charlotte in background moves from left to center. renée. You’re welcome to slap me! But what will you do if I curl up with pleasure at being slapped? montreuil raises her red-gloved right hand as if to hit renée, but slowly lets it sink to caress her cheek. Ohh – your face when you say that… renée. What about my face? montreuil in a low voice. You have become so like Alphonse that I get afraid. renée caressingly leans her face against montreuil’s right hand, then suddenly bites it. What did Madame de Saint-Fond say – “Alphonse is myself!” montreuil slowly takes a step back, turns around and exits in background left. Koto bars. “Alphonse is myself!” Koto bars. Whispers. “Alphonse is myself!” Koto bars as renée slowly exits in background right and charlotte exits in background left. Slow black-out. 12 Cf. B’s remark in the prompt book: “The two sisters now suddenly form a strange unity, a physical and mental kinship is established.” The moment of loving reunion recalls that between sisters Karin and Maria in Cries and Whispers (1973).

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For her last key speech in this sequence, Mishima suggests, Montreuil should raise her voice, whereas Renée’s quotation of Saint-Fond should be said “laughingly.” B ignored both stage directions. The French revolution brought about drastic changes. In Act III wide red curtains between the windows formed the background for Montreuil and Renée seated in chairs, facing the audience. The floor was bare, wooden and grey. Between the two warmly dressed women there was a grey iron stove. Montreuil wore a black dress, black woolen gloves, a grey shawl, and a black crocheted cap covering her bald head. Next to her was a cane and off and on she raised a lorgnette, indications of her ageing. Renée wore a dark red dress and a grey woollen shawl was wrapped round her head recalling a nun’s veil. Her brown hair was sleek like Saint-Fond’s in Act I. Through glasses she was reading the little black book Simiane had been reading in Act I, Justine. Grey, black, and red were now the dominant colours. Charlotte entered and put more coal in the stove.13 The slogan “Pile on more wood!” now seemed to apply to de Sade’s family. At least it was an indication of the cold the new regime had brought about for the aristocratic women now poorly dressed. On the other hand Charlotte’s black dress – she was mourning her former landlady Saint-Fond – looked quite elegant. That the relations between her and her mistress(es) were changed appeared also from Charlotte’s neglect to usher in visitors from the front door. Anne, just back from another visit to Venice, we have noted, wore a long brown fur coat, a matching fur bonnet and long dark-red gloves; inside the coat a dark-red dress with a white pattern of a cherry tree in blossom could be glimpsed. As soon as she had entered she took off her coat and gloves, picked up a pocket mirror and looked at it as she powdered herself. She then took up a cigarette with a holder, lit it on the stove and began drawlingly and indifferently to describe Saint-Fond’s cruel death in Marseille. It was a compassionless, cynical description worthy of a de Sade. She revealed that Saint-Fond, dressed like a prostitute, had been trodden down in a riot. Once dead she had become “the goddess of the people.” This, Anne – quite unhistorically – concluded, was the start of the French revolution. Anne’s absolute contrast, Simiane, was the next to enter. Her black-andwhite dress revealed that she had become a nun. She had come to fetch Renée to the convent she had helped her enter. Soon the two were seen in a pietà position, Renée resting her head in Simiane’s – Mater Ecclesia’s – lap.

13 The filling of the stove to keep warm recalls a situation at the end of Fanny and Alexander, which again points back to the matrimonial scene in B’s 1970 production of A Dream Play.

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A brutal knocking on the front door 14 indicated that the liberated and now powerful de Sade had arrived. He was not let in. The final line of the play was Renée’s order to Charlotte: “Tell him to leave. Tell him: ‘The Marquise never wants to see him again.’” There was a logical reason for this unexpected reversal on Renée’s part. She had just decided to enter a convent. But in addition to this and more importantly her final line signified a total and definite rejection of what de Sade stood for. Before this happened, Mishima’s Renée speaks of “a holy light blinding all beholders.” To Simiane this is the holy light of God but Renée refers to “another kind of light.” Alphonse, she envisions, “puts evil upon evil and climbs the crest of the evil. Soon he will touch eternity. Alphonse has built a back staircase to salvation.” Simiane replies that God will demolish this staircase. But Renée protests: “No – God has perhaps ordered Alphonse to build it.” Renée apparently compares Alphonse to Lucifer or Satan, the fallen archangel whose name means light-carrier. And she keeps the question open where the source of evil and light is to be found. “I shall spend the rest of my life,” she says, “constantly asking God this question.” Renée’s “holy light” was by B complemented with a visual one, the most spectacular light effect in the production: renée is standing on a low stool, in frontal position, her right hand raised, her face lit. simiane, dressed as a nun, is standing in semi-darkness in the background right. renée […] At that moment Louder. the sky breaks. A flood of light showers down Puts her right hand to her forehead, in a low voice. – a holy light Lowers her hand. blinding all beholders.15 And Alphonse, perhaps, is the essence of that light. Blinding white light on the stage turns Renée white. Her head remains turned upward as the light dies out.

In the interview preceding the TV version of the performance, B declared that the play’s key sentence is Renée’s statement: “The world we’re living in now is a world created by the Marquis de Sade.” She obviously refers to the horrors of the French revolution. But when she speaks of “the banquet

14 Reminiscent of the Commander’s ominous knocking at the end of Molière’s Don Juan, staged by B three times who also used the Commander’s launching of Don Juan into hell at the end of his film The Devil’s Eye (1960). 15 In the prompt script B asks himself: “What kind of light does she speak of? [...] Here everything becomes very enigmatic not to say impenetrable.”

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attended by millions of corpses, the quietest of banquets,”16 it may nowadays, B found, be seen as a reference to the annihilation camps of World War II, the height of sadism in world history. In the “blinding white light” at the end of his Madame de Sade, B could instantly show how Renée’s experience of Alphonse as an incarnation of man’s destructive tendency now, two hundred years later, could be shared by humanity at large. Not until the end of the rehearsal period did B, he revealed in the TV interview preceding the TV version of his stage production, discover the connection between the blinding light and another deed of evil: the invention and use of the atom bomb, today the universal icon of global destruction. The “blinding white light” in the stage version was replaced in the TV version by a projection of the mushroom cloud following the explosion of the atom bomb. The production of Madame de Sade received superlatives everywhere. All the women actors were praised. The critics were especially amazed at B’s ability to make dynamic theatre out of a rather static play. There were guest performances in Århus, Tokyo, Jerusalem, Glasgow, Antwerp, Lisbon, Parma, Vilnius, New York, Taiwan and Budapest.

16 This is a very free rendering, suiting B’s purpose, of Keene’s “banquets where a million corpses lie befuddled with carousing, the quietest of banquets.”

8. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House B’s documented interest in A Doll’s House goes back to 1948 when he adapted it for a planned Hollywood film version which, however, never materialised (Steene, 2005: 80). Much later, on April 30, 1981, B’s production of Ibsen’s Nora, as the play is often called in Germany, opened at the Residenztheater in Munich.1 Virtually the same text formed the basis for his second production of the play on the Big Stage of Dramaten. It now carried the traditional Swedish title Ett dockhem.2 A performance intended for a southern German audience in the early 1980s must be different in some respects from one intended for a Swedish public around 1990. Besides the temporal gap, there is the geographical one, the sociopolitical and theatrical climate in Bavaria being rather different from that in Sweden. There is the linguistic difference, a German translation of Ibsen’s play being necessarily more removed from Ibsen’s Dano-Norwegian text than a Swedish one. Moreover, in Munich B was forced to deal with a language which was not his own. In Stockholm he was in that respect on a par with his actors who furthermore shared his social and cultural referential system. In addition to these general distinctions, a more specific one may be added. As earlier noted, the Munich Nora was part of a triad, the other plays being Strindberg’s Miss Julie and B’s own Scenes from a Marriage. As the titles indicate, the three plays all focussed on man-woman relations: Helmer-Nora, Jean-Julie, Johan-Marianne. The triad soon became known as the B project. In Stockholm A Doll’s House was presented as an independent play. Nonetheless the two productions had much in common. Ibsen’s play was drastically cut; nearly one-third of the text was removed; the Nurse, the Maid, the Porter and two of the three children were omitted. The three acts in the play were replaced by fifteen scenes. It is a common misconception that the Helmers live in a house of their own. But the text explicitly states that they live in a “flat.” To make this clear 1 The German script has been published in English translation in Marker/Marker, 1983: 47-99; this book also contains a discussion of the Munich production (19-31). For an analysis of this production, see also Marker/Marker, 1991: 229-45. 2 In English, the play has been variously called A Doll’s House and A Doll House. The former seems to be a British preference, the latter an American. “What few translators seem to realise is that Ibsen’s title does not mean a house for dolls, which in Norwegian is dukkehus, or dukkestue. Before Ibsen, et dukkehjem was a small, cozy, neat home; his play gave it the pejorative meaning” (Haugen, 1979: 103).

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to the spectators, B opened his production with a black-and-white projection on the curtain of an art nouveau apartment house (Olofgörs, 1995: 223). From this elegant façade the spectators moved – as in a camera zoom – to the Helmer apartment above. The play was acted out on a quadrilateral platform, surrounded by high walls, topped by eight small barred windows, making it look like a prison. By surrounding the Helmer home with a huge vertical space, B diminished the characters and turned them into dolls in a doll’s house. “The little room – the home – [was] placed inside a larger room which [was] society,” Zern wrote in Expressen, and this larger room “in the course of the evening [was] transformed into a universe, a human cosmos, a home on earth.” Ibsen’s unity of setting was replaced by the presentation of three different rooms of the Helmer apartment: the living room, the dining room, and the bedroom. Scenery and costumes suggested that B’s Doll’s House was set some twenty years later than Ibsen’s, around 1900. The union flags in the Christmas tree indicated that the action took place prior to 1905, when the union between Sweden and Norway was dissolved. Moving the play closer to our time increased the audience’s sense of being in rapport with the characters; Nora’s breaking out of her marriage seemed in this way more plausible. The fashion around 1900 also helped to make the characters’ bodies, especially Nora’s, erotically present. Last but not least, since the opening took place in one of the most beautiful art nouveau buildings in Stockholm – Dramaten was completed in 1908 – there was a great correspondence between the period in which the action was set and the theatrical environment around it. This was indicated in the very beginning when a strong spotlight lit up the proscenium painting above the stage, showing a frontal Eros surrounded by the three parcae. This highlighting of a celestial level seemed to turn the drama acted out below it into a human puppet play, dominated by love – or lack of love. Thematically the production aimed at an “Ehrenrettung for Helmer” (prompt copy),3 who when the play opens has just become head of a bank. 3 Cf. B’s comment on Helmer in the Munich production: “He’s a decent man who is trapped in his role of being the man, the husband. He tries to play his role as well as he can – because it is the only one he knows and understands” (Marker/Marker, 1983: 12f.). B clearly defended Helmer but his arguments were unconvincingly vague. In what sense is Helmer trapped in his male role? And how does he “play his role as well as he can”? A more balanced picture of husband-wife relations was to be seen in B’s TV series Scenes from a Marriage (1973), where Johan and Marianne, having witnessed a performance of A Doll’s House discuss the marital relationship in the play. B’s productions of A Doll’s House in many ways seemed inspired by Scenes from a Marriage (Törnqvist, 1995: 164ff.).

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Ibsen was forced to turn Helmer into an authoritarian husband to make his audience accept Nora’s decision to leave him. A century later this kind of Helmer comes over as a caricature and Nora’s choice that was so shocking in Ibsen’s time now seems much less problematic. B’s Helmer was a man not without idealism and very committed to his work. In an added passage he told his wife: “Nora, I have acquired my position by opposing in the newspaper the way the bank was run, and by being harsh at the last shareholders’ meeting.” After Krogstad, in an attempt to blackmail Nora, had boasted that within a year not Helmer but he, Krogstad, would run the bank, B added the following lines: nora. So that is what you want. krogstad. That is what I want. nora.You want to deprive him of his future? krogstad. He has deprived me of my future. nora. The bank is his mission in life. Should he give up his mission and make himself dependent of you? krogstad. Precisely, Mrs Helmer, and that he should do out of love for you.

Instead of Ibsen’s authoritarian prig and careerist, B’s Helmer was a man who did his best to improve the morals of the bank; to dismiss the morally tainted Krogstad, Helmer implies, was part of this endeavour. By modulating the character in this way B clearly strived to make Helmer a representative man for his audience. A striking aspect was that during the whole performance the actors never disappeared out of sight. Exits were indicated simply by their leaving the platform stage for the background, where they remained seated until their next entrance. With this device, 4 B placed his production in an illusion-breaking tradition, indicating the constant flux between on-stage and off-stage role-playing, between theatre and life. Moreover, by letting the actors, when off-platform, form a stage audience, he provided a link between them and the real audience. Combined with the barred windows of the setting, the impression was that the stage audience was a jury in a courtroom sitting in judgment on the marital relationship that was acted

4 Earlier used in his productions of The Misanthrope, where it would clash less with the non-illusionistic style of the play and moreover provide a link with the habit in Molière’s time to have the actors seated on the stage behind the wings.

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out before them. But unlike a real jury, they themselves, when on-stage, were indirectly involved in this relationship. On the stage, representing the living room, a green art nouveau sofa and armchair could be seen, as well as a decorated Christmas tree and a heap of parcels. Behind the platform a green-tinted bourgeois art nouveau dining room could be glimpsed: round table, chairs, and above the centrally placed piano a large painting. Reminiscent of a picture out of a photo album, the setting seemed to indicate Nora’s vacillation between the world of the present and the world of the past, the green colour bridging the two worlds. In the second scene, the foreground shifted from green living room to brown dining room, while the background, still green-tinted, now displayed a sideboard with two candelabras, above it flowery art nouveau wallpaper, and as in the former scene, a large painting. The brown colour, here associated with bourgeois materialism, was now set off against the green of the background. With Krogstad’s appearance, the distance between imprisoning, earthy reality and lofty dream – the candelabras turned the background sideboard into a kind of altar – had increased. The round table on the platform was mirrored in an almost identical table in the background ‘photo,’ creating an eerie, dreamlike effect. The impression that the play was acted out in two different worlds – one three-dimensional and real, the other two-dimensional and imaginary – was hereby strengthened. Since the projected furniture in the background appeared larger than the real pieces in the foreground, the doll’s house connotations of the scenery were further underscored. An aged Rank appeared in an elegant fin-de-siècle costume, whereas a young successful Torvald Helmer was fashionably dressed according to the dernier cri. Krogstad could be seen in a mold-green coat, while Mrs Linde was dressed completely in black as though in mourning – although her husband had been dead for three years. Her costume was clearly designed to correspond to Nora’s at the end of the play, where it was clear that Nora had taken over the role that Mrs Linde had outgrown. Nora first appeared in an Empire dress, olive green above, brownish below and with an olive green apron, on which a small N was symbolically embroidered inside a big H. The colours of her dress closely matched that of the sofa on which she was sitting, indicating her adjustment to the environment. Later, she appeared, first in a pink silk dress with a broad black sash, then, after the fancy-dress ball, in a black-and-white Capri costume, underneath which a bright red petticoat could be glimpsed; she also wore a black shawl, as prescribed by Ibsen. When Helmer had read the first, threatening letter from Krogstad, he angrily ordered her to take off her shawl. It was an act of unmasking.

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When he had read the second, conciliatory letter, he protectively laid the shawl around her shoulders. The mask was put back in place. Ibsen’s Nora leaves not only her husband but also her three small children. Today, when most people would accept that a wife might divorce her husband if she finds the marriage hollow, many would still claim that the presence of young children should prevent her from doing so. But leaving three children motherless is less sad than leaving a single child in such a situation. After all, three children have one another. Consequently, B settled for one child, a daughter, Hilde, who looked about six years old. Appearing only at the beginning and end of the play, she was nevertheless symbolically present throughout the performance in the form of her doll seated on one of the chairs next to the acting area. Ibsen’s text opens with the Christmas tree being delivered to the Helmers. Already at this point the tree has a symbolic significance (Johnston, 1989: 145, Quigley, 1985: 99f.). B showed little interest in this rather reader-oriented aspect. He exchanged Ibsen’s opening for one of his own and the tree was already placed and decorated when the curtain rose. Notwithstanding its realism, A Doll’s House contains a number of soliloquies, nearly all of them by Nora (Törnqvist, 2006: 54-63). The reason for this is that the recipient needs to be informed about Nora’s increasing anguish as the threats against her cumulate. The soliloquies are in other words part of the preparatory technique and a sign of Ibsen’s dependency on the conventions of the well-made play. Even the last line of the play is a soliloquy. After Nora has left, Helmer says “with sudden hope. The miracle of miracles…?” For some recipients this may be an indication that Helmer may be able to change; for others it is only a subjective indication that he hopes so at this moment. In either case there is a vague suggestion of a possible reunion and a new start. Today we find the soliloquies disturbing, less because of their lacking plausibility than because of their over-explicitness. B deleted all the soliloquies and replaced Helmer’s vaguely hopeful soliloquy, as we shall see, with a desperate whisper. The performance opened with a situation, created by the director, and very different from Ibsen’s initial tipping sequence. Nora was sitting on the sofa reading the end of a fairy tale aloud to her identically dressed daughter: “...but a prince and his bride brought with them as much silver as they could carry. And they moved to the castle east of the sun and west of the moon.” The reading was accompanied by sweet, romantic piano music, “The Maiden’s Prayer” (1851), as from a music-box. Having received

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a goodnight kiss from her mother, Hilde left for bed. Nora lay down on the sofa, whistling the tune that had just been heard, put one arm in the air, then let it fall down as her whistling petered out. What B presented in this opening was an emblematic situation, a key to Nora’s existence: her desire to see life in terms of a fairy tale (with its obligatory happy ending) and her vague awareness that life is anything but that. Very effectively, it was demonstrated how Nora who, as an only child, had herself figuratively speaking been brought up on fairy tales by her father now continued this tradition with regard to her only daughter. Three generations were implicitly interwoven in this initial situation, suggesting a perpetuum mobile. Sitting on the floor, Nora then began to unwrap the Christmas presents, while calling for her husband: “Come here, Torvald, and see what I’ve bought.” From a realistic point of view, this might seem strange, since in Sweden Christmas presents are supposed to be hidden until Christmas Eve. But what was important here was that the audience should see that Nora had bought her daughter a doll for a Christmas present. The deeper significance of this was not revealed until the end of the performance. When Helmer joined Nora behind the Christmas parcels, they looked like two little children – in accordance with B’s recurrent idea that grownups are merely children masquerading as grown-ups. As we have seen, psychological role-playing was continually stressed in the production. “As far as I understand,” Strindberg (1982, 16: 14) writes in his preface to Getting Married, “Nora offers herself for sale – to be paid for in cash.” Strindberg’s idea that Nora ‘prostitutes’ herself was utilised already in the opening of the performance.5 After all, B seemed to argue, it is not the Nora-Rank relationship that is corrupt but the Nora-Helmer one. This was demonstrated in the initial monetary scene: helmer still sitting on the floor front-stage, takes out his wallet. Nora, what do you suppose I have here? nora who has been standing by the Christmas tree in the background, jumps onto the sofa, triumphantly shouting. Money! helmer. Good heavens, of course I realise it costs a lot to run a house at Christmas time. nora still on the sofa, picks one banknote after the other from helmer’s open wallet – after each approving nod by him. Ten, twenty, thirty. He 5 Cf. B’s remark that Strindberg wrote “a wonderful analysis of A Doll’s House in his preface to Married. Some of what he says is very perceptive” (Marker/Marker, 1983: 12).

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closes the wallet but opens it again and lets her have one more. Forty. Oh thank you, Torvald, thank you. I’ll make this go a long way. helmer. And what have you thought of for yourself? nora. What, for me? I don’t want anything. helmer. Of course you do. Name something that you’d like to have – within reason, of course. nora. No, I really don’t know. As a matter of fact, though, Torvald... helmer. Well? nora embraces him. If you really want to give me something, you could of course – you could – helmer embraces her. Come on, let’s have it! nora lies down on the floor and drags him with her. You could give me money, Torvald. Stretching her legs in the air on either side of helmer now lying on top of her. Only as much as you think you can spare. Then I could buy something for it.

Here Helmer’s and Nora’s marriage was emblematically depicted. The coitus position demonstrated how she was offering her body in exchange for the money he had just been offering her. Their representative marriage was no more than legalised prostitution. By presenting the Helmer marriage as starkly as this, B provided a logical basis for Nora’s decision at the end to free herself from a relationship which was degrading for both of them. The passage seemed choreographically designed to contrast with Nora’s attitude at the end, where she refuses to accept anything from her husband, now labeled a stranger. Strindberg’s severe criticism of Nora refers not to the monetary scene but to her exhibiting her silk stockings to Rank. In B’s interpretation, this passage suggested anything but ‘prostitution’ on Nora’s part: (nora is standing behind rank, who is sitting on a chair. Both face the audience.) She puts her hands on his shoulders. nora. Be nice now. Puts her hands over his eyes. Tomorrow you’ll see how well I’ll dance. And that I do it only for you. And for Torvald, of course. Removes her hands. I’ll show you something. Takes up one of her black silk stockings, shakes it, has it glide down across his forehead to his eyes. Silk stockings. Removes the stocking from his eyes, lifts it up. Aren’t they beautiful? It’s very dark in here now, of course, but tomorrow –. But how critical you look! Don’t you think they’ll fit me? Puts the stocking around rank’s neck. rank. I can’t really give you a qualified opinion on that. nora looks at him, smilingly. Shame on you!

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Substituting black stockings for Ibsen’s “flesh-coloured” ones and omitting Nora’s “Oh well, I suppose you can look a bit higher if you want to,” B was clearly not interested in emphasising the erotic relationship between Nora and Rank. Rather, the scene stressed the fact that they both had imminent death on their mind. When Nora blindfolded Rank’s eyes with her black stocking, she visually turned him into a victim before an executioner. When she put the stocking around his neck, she provided another ‘death sentence’ for him. Yet since the stocking belonged to Nora who was herself a victim of circumstances and who might well be contemplating suicide already at this point – a little later she manifestly did so – both gestures applied also to her. The subtext of B’s version was not a regret that they could not sleep with one another; it was rather a consoling and self-consoling ritual suggesting of commonness in death. Nothing in the play is outwardly as spectacular as Nora’s rehearsing of the tarantella at the end of Act II, the dance she is to perform at the fancy-dress ball the following evening. On the most obvious level, Nora dances the tarantella to distract Helmer’s attention from the fateful letter-box. Her wild dancing expresses her fear that he will discover her crime. Helmer is unable to guide Nora but Rank, who is himself doomed to die shortly, is more successful. Rank and Nora, both in the shadow of death, understand one another intuitively. Helmer understands nothing. The many references to failed attempts at guidance help to pinpoint the fact that Nora, although she has herself asked Helmer for it, no longer follows his instruction. Still respecting him, she is instinctively breaking away from him. In this sense the tarantella prepares for her discovery at the end that she and her husband have in fact never understood one another. The reason why Nora practices a tarantella of all dances is because this rapid, whirling, south Italian dance reminds Helmer and herself of their happy time in and around Naples. But the tarantella means more. As used by Ibsen, it forms a sophisticated motif which demands a certain factual knowledge both of the dance and of the spider that has given the dance its name: The tarantula spider is reputedly poisonous, and anyone bitten by it is likely to contract the disease of tarantism. This is ‘a hysterical malady, characterized by an extreme impulse to dance’. And the cure for this malady was held to be – dancing the tarantella. Thus, ‘the dancing was sometimes held to be a symptom or consequence of the malady, sometimes practiced as a sovereign cure for it’. The symptom of the disease and the cure for the disease are one and the same. (Quigley, 1985: 107)

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The wildness with which Nora dances the tarantella is indeed similar to what we would expect from someone bitten by the tarantula. Squeezed between Krogstad’s demands and Helmer’s stern moralising, she has got the poison in her system. Suicide is on her mind. And at the same time a vague hope that a miracle might save her. The tarantella is a fitting, theatrically powerful expression of her schizophrenic situation. With Ibsen the sequence begins when Nora “plays the opening bars of the tarantella” on the piano. Helmer then sits down at the piano and accompanies her as she begins to dance, swinging her tambourine. Displeased with her manner of dancing, Helmer accepts Rank’s suggestion that he takes over the accompaniment, finding that he, Helmer, will then be better able to instruct Nora. But Nora at this point “pays no attention” to his instructions. She goes on dancing wildly. B considerably shortened the tarantella sequence. Gone was the piano. Gone was Rank’s accompaniment. Gone was Mrs Linde’s sudden appearance. Some twenty-two repartees were reduced to seven: nora is sitting on the round table covered with a table cloth, her red Capri costume on top of it. helmer stands next to her with the tambourine in his hand. rank stands to the left. nora. I shan’t be able to dance tomorrow if I don’t rehearse with you. Stands up, puts her hands on helmer’s shoulders. I must try now immediately. Torvald, you must correct me and Strokes his forehead and cheek. lead me, the way you always do. Chuckles. Tears off the table cloth and throws it and her Capri costume on the floor. Pulls up her pink dress, thereby showing her naked legs, starts humming and dancing. helmer sitting on the chair right, beats time with his hands. Slower, slower. nora. It has to be like this. She dances ever wilder, beating the tambourine with her hand. helmer. Not so wild, Nora! nora screams. It has to be like this. helmer. No, no, this won’t do. Stop it, I say. nora throws away the tambourine, puts her hands to her ears. Jumps from the table, runs to rank and embraces him. Then runs to the chair right. helmer puts back the cloth on the table. rank picks up the Capri costume and stands holding it. nora sitting on the chair right in a dejected position. There you see for yourself. You must show me right to the end. Promise, Torvald? Promise!

B reduced the situation and the dialogue to its essence, thereby stressing Helmer’s inability to determine Nora’s way of life any longer. Even more

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than Ibsen’s, B’s tarantella became an early demonstration of her revolt, a preparation for her final breaking away from her husband. Danced on the table, so that her legs could be seen by the two men, Nora’s tarantella had a lascivious element of French cabaret in it, strengthening the sense of rebellion. While her mild tenderness toward Helmer followed by her embrace of Rank revealed her attitude to the two men. Helmer’s orderly concern with the table cloth was as symptomatic of his mentality as was Rank’s concern with Nora’s dress, a follow-up, as it were, of his concern with her stockings. The ending was set in the Helmer bedroom.6 In the background the living room and the dining room could again be seen as huge photographs. As Nora contemplated her past life with Helmer, the three rooms visualised their eight years together. The photo-album connotation seemed especially relevant when Nora began to contemplate taking leave of her life, a mood that might favour her remembrance of things past. At the end, Ellefsen in Dagens Nyheter wrote, B’s Doll’s House “turns into scenes from a marriage, into distant pictures of an old photo album, where soft shades finally change into modern black-and-white.” The idea behind the change of setting was that husband and wife have spent a night together. He believed that she had reconciled herself with him. She was inclined to think that this was their last night together. When the scene opened, showing a slender white art nouveau double bed with a glaring red bedspread, Helmer was seen asleep in it. When Nora entered, dressed in a simple black coat and carrying a small travelling-bag, he woke up. In the dark part of the stage on the left Nora was now seen standing, fully dressed in ‘mourning.’ To the right, bathed in a searing white light, Helmer was sitting in bed, stark naked, defenceless, unmasked. On the bedpost hung the red jester’s cap he had worn at the fancy-dress ball the night before. While explaining her new position to him, Nora moved back and forth from the shade on the left to the brightly lit area on the right, from isolation to communion – as though she was struggling with the question: to leave or not to leave. The ending was enacted as follows: helmer sitting to the right in the double bed, looking down. Nora, – can I never be anything but a stranger to you? nora standing on the left, the travelling-bag in her hand. Oh, Torvald, then the most wonderful thing would have to happen – helmer looks up. Name it, this most wonderful thing! 6 B was not the first director who set the ending in the marital bedroom. In his 1953 London production of the play, Peter Ashmore did the same.

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nora puts the bag down, walks up to the bed. You and I would both have to change so much that – Oh, Torvald... I don’t believe in wonders any more. She turns and goes left, half covering her face with one hand. Takes the black shawl in her left hand, the bag in her right one. helmer. But I’ll believe in them. Tell me! Change so much that –? nora turns away from him, wipes her eyes with her handkerchief, picks up her travelling-bag, turns around and looks at him, in a warm but firm voice. That our marriage could become a life together. Pause. Turns away. Goodbye. Exits left. helmer. Nora. Nora! Nora!! The front door slams shut. Whispers. Nora. Darkness, curtain.

B’s in-depth choreography could be sensed in this unconventional way of ending the play. While most directors would have Nora answer Helmer’s question concerning “the most wonderful thing” straight away, B inserted a pause at this point to ensure maximum suspense. In this way, the audience was given time to wonder, with Helmer, what the most wonderful thing might be – and so to feel empathy with him. In addition, the pause gave proper weight to Nora’s key sentence. In the source text this line reads: “At samliv mellem os to kunde bli’e et ægteskab.” (That our life together could become a marriage.) For Ibsen “marriage” was the viable concept in the line; for B, offering his version to a present-day audience, it was rather “life together.” The director cleverly updated the play – thereby adjusting it to the changes in man-woman relations during the last hundred years – simply by having the two key words change places. He had Nora say: “Att ett äktenskap mellan oss två blev ett samliv.” (That the marriage between the two of us became a life together.) The returning of the rings – the formal symbol of divorce – took place in front of the projected black-and-white photo of the sideboard in the dining room with its two candelabras, a setting recalling the altar in front of which the marriage was once contracted and which was now annulled. Eight years of married life were, as it were, contained in this fusing of two significant moments. As soon as the rings had been returned, Hilde appeared, silently watching her mother’s leave-taking. Woken up by the shouting of the parents, she became a witness to what was nothing like the happy fairy-tale ending Nora had wished her good night with the opening. Hilde now wore a blue nightdress – similar in style to the one Nora had been wearing in the beginning – and carried the similarly dressed doll she had just received from her mother in her arms. The device came close to what the Dutch refer to as

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Droste effect, so called after the chocolate packets showing a nurse carrying a Droste packet on her tray, this packet again showing a nurse carrying a Droste packet on her tray, this packet... – ad infinitum. Left alone with her father – just as Nora had once been left alone with her father – Hilde seemed doomed to relive Nora’s experience. Deprived of her mother and lacking a sister or brother, Hilde would have to console herself by playing the role of mother to her doll. In his ending B in this way outlined the vicious circle in which the single child with just one parent finds itself – a central issue in a social environment where divorces tend to be the rule rather than the exception. When Nora made her final exit from the platform stage, she passed by Mrs Linde and Krogstad sitting next to it. The happily united couple was proxemically, and ironically, contrasted with the separating marital partners. While the Munich Nora left through a closet door at the back of the stage, the Stockholm Nora left via the auditorium – as if she was a member of the audience, departing from the theatre along with them. This was an ending very much in the spirit suggested in a study of the play, published the same year as B’s Dramaten production: Un metteur en scène a-t-il imaginé de faire jouer Maison de poupée en costumes contemporains de sa mise en scène et, à la fin, pendant qu’Helmer reste seul en scène, de faire venir Nora dans la salle, de lui faire prendre place parmi les spectateur? Mais le rideau, alors, pourrait-il se baisser? (Chevrel, 1989: 108)

Characteristic of B’s two productions of A Doll’s House was the reliance on a strongly adapted version, in which much of Ibsen’s concern for realistic plausibility – what we now tend to see as surface realism – was done away with. As a result, a stylised psychological drama came to the fore in which the off-stage characters were related to the audience. This attempt to bridge the gulf between stage and auditorium was especially noticeable in the Stockholm version, where the drama was acted out on a timeless, universal platform between the art nouveau decor in the background and the art nouveau auditorium in front. An earlier plan to have Nora also at the end appear in an art nouveau coat was discarded in favour of a more anonymous, less time-specific one, which could render her more representative and relate her better to the audience. While Nora’s emancipation was the central issue in the version presented to the Bavarian audience, it was rather the consequences of her departure for her only daughter – read: the next generation – that became the central

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issue at the end of the version offered to the Swedish audience, an audience increasingly aware of the problems pertaining to the children of parents belonging to the divorcing generation. To put it differently: while the Munich production focussed on the marital relationship, the Stockholm one broadened the perspective. At the end, little Hilde vivified not only the present situation. She also represented Nora as a child – Nora, too, having been suddenly bereaved of a parent. By implication – the doll in her arms – she suggested her own future single-parent role. As in the opening of the production, three generations were in this way combined, suggesting a fateful perpetuum mobile.7 B’s Doll’s House did not end with Torvald Helmer’s8 vague hope that “the most wonderful thing” will come true. Instead his twice increasingly loud and anguished shouting for “Nora!”, as she was departing, followed by a powerless whispering of her name, indicated his shrinking hope that she would ever come back.9 Most critics were enthusiastic about B’s fresh approach to the play and especially praised the actress playing Nora, but some put question marks at B’s reinterpretation of the relationship between the married couple. There were guest performances in Madrid, Venice, Bergen, Glasgow, Oslo, Copenhagen, New York, and in Japan (details missing).

7 Cf. B’s Wild Strawberries, where three generations are fatefully linked to each other. 8 B’s updated husband was actually more Torvald than Helmer. 9 “To me,” B once said, “the ending is exceedingly ambiguous. I don’t find it so impressive that Nora departs. [...] I wanted him [Helmer] to sit there naked and vulnerable like a victim and the child, too, to stand there” (Sjögren, 2002: 243).

9. Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt For a long time Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, subtitled “A Dramatic Poem,” was regarded as a play solely for the reader, a closet drama; it took nine years for it to reach the stage. Today it is frequently produced, often by big companies and renowned directors; with its multitude of characters and locations, productions of it tend to be costly.1 B showed his interest in the play by producing it twice. The first production took place at Malmö City Theatre in 1957. The translation was by Karl-Ragnar Gierow. 90 actors appeared in 33 scenes. Rather than Grieg’s or even Sæverud’s music, both specially composed for the play, B made sparse use of Norwegian folk music. Max von Sydow in the title role was “a dark-haired lad with gypsy blood in his veins.” Despite some cuts the performance lasted almost five hours (Steene, 2005: 581f.). In his second production, in 1991, about one third of the drama text was omitted and the running time was reduced to nearly half of that in Malmö. In the booklet accompanying the theatre program the substantial deletions, this time in Lars Forssell’s translation, were indicated. Among these are the two passages dealing with the young man cutting off his own finger to avoid conscription and the speech by the pastor at his funeral much later. Like most of the other characters surrounding Peer, the function of this army wash-out is to throw ideological and psychological light on Peer, who is his parallel and contrast (Fjelde in Ibsen, 1964: xviiif.). The Memnon statue, “a monument of Peer’s own petrified self,” and the Lean Man, an incarnation of the Devil, who suddenly appears as Peer’s co-passenger are other examples of substantial deletions. About all three characters can be said that because Ibsen provides so many examples of elements mirroring Peer’s mentality or fate, it is quite easy to leave out some of them without disturbing the loose structure of the play, whose unity largely relies on the all-dominating protagonist and the leitmotif “be thyself.” As the subtitle of the play indicates, Ibsen’s text is in verse. Moreover, it is in rhymed verse. Although Ibsen’s Dano-Norwegian is linguistically close to Swedish, the rhyming offers many difficulties. In his translation, Forssell therefore settled for a compromise. In order to preserve as much

1

For a survey of Peer Gynt productions, see Marker/Marker, 1989: 9-45.

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as possible of the meaning in the source text he usually omits the rhymes; only in the more lyrical parts they are retained.2 As in 1957 the performance was divided into three parts called “Tales and Dreams,” “Foreign Lands,” and “The Homecoming.” From the huge Malmö stage in his first production, B took the play to the small stage of Dramaten’s Paint Room in his second. The limited acting space was enlarged through a walkway that extended into the audience, and by a platform that hovered above the stage and could be moved both up and down and sideways. A fundamental idea behind the production was that Peer is an inveterate dreamer and that virtually everything takes place in his imagination. Unlike Ibsen’s anti-hero who – like his biblical paragon – wins the world and in the process loses his soul, B’s Peer merely nourished megalomaniac dreams. His moral failure consisted in his utter lack of commitment. He was, B said in a radio comment (April 25, 1991), a mother’s boy and an egoist lacking in concern for others. In an often quoted stanza, Ibsen says that to write is to sit in judgment of oneself. Several critics of B’s Peer Gynt had the impression that this was precisely what the director was doing when turning his protagonist into an artistic, self-centered, and cowardly figure lacking in love for his fellow-men. Ibsen’s Peer is “a powerfully built boy of twenty.” B’s Peer was a middle-aged, corpulent bon-vivant who spent his life dreaming about deeds that never materialised. Peer Gynt travels around the world; the floor and the dinner table become mountains and ships. It begins as a tall tale to make his mother happy. Fantasy becomes a necessity. When his life’s journey comes to an end Peer Gynt has moved us around the whole world but the world has all the time remained in Mother Aase’s kitchen. (B in Löfgren, 1997: 125)

This was strikingly indicated by having the whole action take place in the house of Peer’s mother Aase; not only the stage but also the sidewalls in the auditorium revealed that both characters and audience found themselves in her wooden farmhouse with peasant paintings on the walls.3 Scenographically a theatrum mundi was created that strengthened the spectators’ 2 This compromise is largely in agreement with Ibsen’s own view that in a translation of the play the meter of the original should be retained as much as possible whereas the rhymes could be suppressed (Smidt, 2000: 22). 3 B was preceded in this spatial interiorisation by a 1975 production of Brecht’s Mother Courage, in which the whole performance was conceived as taking place in the wagon of Mother Courage (Innes, 1993: 177).

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identification with the protagonist; his environment was theirs. What the action basically boiled down to, Andréason in Göteborgs-Posten illuminated, was how “a boy leaves Mother Aase’s embrace in the bed of the farmhouse and four hours – and a whole life – later returns to the same bed and hides his face in Solveig’s womb. [...] A circular movement from one maternal womb to another, and at the same time a movement from morning to evening, from childhood to old age.” In the middle of the room a small table could be seen and an elegant upholstered chair next to it, to the right a bed and a grandfather clock, on the floor a red carpet. “Mementos of ‘the good times’ associated with Jon Gynt were still on display in the hut: the spendthrift’s crest hanging over the lintel, his faded picture above the narrow bed […] and a smashed pier-glass with a bottle still lodged in it all bespoke the boozer’s past glory” (Marker/Marker, 1992: 279). The paintings on the wall, it says in the prompt script, represent “tales that have been told” in this room. Already in the opening “Aase’s and Peer’s deep love for one another” was demonstrated; the two “were lying together in the bed, turned to each other under the cover” (prompt script). Aase, in grey nightshirt, grey slippers and white hair “à la Sara Lidman” (Ellefsen in Dagens Nyheter), the well-known committed radical writer, first climbed out of bed and began to prepare breakfast. Peer significantly remained for a while in bed – Aase complains that he stays “in bed […] all day” – then got up and sat down at the table in his white nightshirt. Aase busily moved from stove to table serving her son who gluttonously devoted himself to his porridge. Peer’s story about his buck-ride soon attracted Aase’s interest and made her sit down next to him until she realised that her son had again come up with a tall tale. When he told her that he had once been beaten up by Aslak, the smith, she was personally humiliated; mother and son shared their family pride. When Aase told him that Mads Moen was about to marry Ingrid of Hægstad, Peer immediately dressed up in starched shirt-breast and black three-part costume, ready to go to Hægstad. Before he left they played a Chaplinesque game running around the room with Peer’s bowler hats on their heads. Before he leaves Ibsen’s Peer puts Aase on “the millhouse roof.” B’s Peer, limited to Aase’s interior, put her in the larder. Once in Hægstad, Peer was surrounded by all those invited to celebrate the wedding of Mads and Ingrid. Retaining the red carpet from Aase’s farmstead, B had all the guests dressed in what looked more like oriental than Norwegian folk costumes, all of them in red shades. 4 Peer in his black 4 The scenographer was inspired by dresses he had seen in the countryside in Syria and Jordan (Bergman/Harning, 2008: 171).

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suit was markedly the uninvited outsider – and from another point of view the ‘dreamer’ of the scene. The dance music consisted solely of rhythmic clog dancing by the guests on either side of Peer, suggestive of the aggressiveness experienced by him. At one point they teased him by putting a rope to his bottom as if he had a tail, the first explicit suggestion of his animal self and a preparation for what was later to happen to him among the Dovre trolls. After he had been refused to dance by five girls, Peer saw Solveig arriving with her parents and her little sister Helga. With Ibsen we get: peer gynt steps in the newcomers’ path and, pointing to solveig, asks the man. Can I dance with your daughter? the man quietly. You may; but first we’ll go in and pay our respects to the host. the chief cook to peer, offering him a drink. Since you’re here, you may have a drink from the jar. peer gynt looking at the passers-by. Thanks, I’ll be dancing. I ain’t thirsty. the chief cook leaves him. peer gynt looks toward the house and laughs. How fair! Have you ever seen the like!

With B this became: solveig’s parents and sister helga in from walkway. solveig in after them. peer gynt. Can I dance with your daughter? solveig’s father. You may. But first we’ll pay our respects to the host. solveig’s mother. Come now, Solveig! They move into the house. peer gynt alone. She was fair as the light.

Note how B, in this first meeting between Peer and Solveig, focussed on the two by deleting the Chief Cook and by having Solveig enter separately; how he inserted a line by the Mother, distinguishing her attitude to her daughter from that of the Father; and how Forssell’s free translation of Peer’s line made this meeting even verbally poetical. Ibsen’s speaker labels are often nameless: “an older man, another, a third, a fourth.” B provided these characters with typically Norwegian Christian names: “finn, ole, odd, egil.” A collective label like “others” in

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a man half-drunk. You [Peer] wait, and we’ll thrash your coat. others. Your back gone over! A blue-painted eye!

became individualised into finn half-drunk. Wait, and we’ll thrash your coat. ole. And make mince-meat of you. odd. And beat you black and blue. egil. And give you a clout.

The brutal threats were coming not from a unified chorus but, more realistically, from different people. When Peer learns that the bride, Ingrid, has locked herself in, he seizes the opportunity and runs away with her to the mountains. Preoccupied with Solveig he brutally repudiates Ingrid. Banished for having kidnapped her, he spends his time in the forest where he soon meets the Woman in Green, the folkloristic Huldre or Lady of the Forest who entices men. She brings him to her father, the Troll King, where Peer is confronted with the difference between man and troll, between being true to yourself and being enough to yourself.5 He agrees to become a troll on condition that, married to the Woman in Green, he will inherit half the kingdom. In B’s version the scene among the Dovre trolls was, not surprisingly, acted out in green light. The wild dancing at Hægstad now had its counterpart in the wild dancing of the trolls. The connection was strengthened by the fact that the children of the Troll King had the same names as some of the guests at Hægstad: Ole and Finn, Synnöve, and Hilde. In place of a crown the Troll King wore a 19th century police helmet and nourished, caricaturing Peer, the illusion of eternal life; “when I die some time” was changed to “if I ever die.” When Ibsen’s Peer declares that he wants to dissolve his marriage to the Woman in Green, she “gets pain and is carried out by the troll maidens.” Her pain does not come from Peer’s statement; it is a euphemistic way of saying that she is in labour. B showed her, accompanied by throbbing heart beats, giving birth to the Troll Child, who virtually jumped from her womb onto his father Peer lying on the floor below, where he, surrounded by darkness, spot-lit sucked Peer’s blood like a werewolf. 5 In the source text the difference, more subtly, is the verbally slight one between “være sig selv” and “være sig selv nok.”

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The ringing of church bells causes the trolls to flee, leaving Peer alone in pitch darkness. He is now confronted with the Boyg,6 a mysterious figure in the list of dramatis personae indicated as “A Voice in the Darkness.” This is precisely what it was in B’s first production but in his second it received in addition visual shape and became “ingeniously concrete and elusive at the same time” (Mario Grut in Aftonbladet). No less than fifteen actors and actresses circled around Peer in billowing movements – first from left to right, then from right to left – dressed exactly like him, each of them with a mirror directed to him.7 As Peer saw himself mirrored by fifteen Peers, so his “Who are you?” was constantly boomeranged with the answer: “Myself.” At the end of B’s Part One, Aase dies. Ignoring the danger – he is still banished – and aware that her end is near, Peer has come to see her. To console her in her last moments he pretends – as he has presumably learned from Aase as a child – that the bed is a horse-driven sledge and that they are driving to Soria Moria Castle, the Arabic name for the Isles of the Blessed. Sitting “at the end of the bed” with a cord in one hand and a stick in the other, Peer pretends that he and the horse, Grane,8 are taking his mother to Heaven. Once he gets God’s assurance that “Mother Aase can come in free,” he turns around to watch her: peer gynt. […] Why do you stare so? Aren’t you well? Mother, you’re not yourself. Goes to the head of the bed. Don’t lie there staring. Say something. It’s Peer, your son! Cautiously feels her forehead and hands, then throws the cord on the chair and says quietly. Oh! You can rest now, Grane. We can unharness now. Closes her eyes and bends over her. Thanks, mother, for all you’ve forsaken, for tales, for weal and woe. But now you may thank me back. 6 The Boyg, i.e. “the bent one,” is a supernatural, destructive creature in Norwegian folklore.  7 B was here inspired by the folkloristic idea that mist close to the ground is a dance of elves. In the prompt script it says: “Peer meets himself, the magic elf rings.” 8 Grane is the horse in Germanic mythology given by Odin to Sigurd Fafnesbane. Sigurd rides on Grane through a wall of flames to liberate Brynhild on behalf of Gunnar. 

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Presses his cheek against her mouth. There! That was thanks for the ride. the cottager’s wife. What? Peer! So then it’s ended, her deepest sorrow and dread. Oh Lord, how well she sleeps – or is she –? peer gynt. Shh. She’s dead. kari weeps by the corpse; peer gynt for a long time walks around in the room, finally he stops by the bed. peer gynt. Let mother be buried with honor. I must try to go away.

With Ibsen Peer’s fantasy is his way of helping his mother to face death. In B’s version it was rather the other way around. “Aase” – I quote from the prompt script – “feels Peer’s anguish and helps him by provoking him to tell a story.” 9 In B’s version it was she, not he, who was courageous and showed loving concern. B showed Aase half-sitting in bed with a yellow-and-brown knitted blanket wrapped around her and a grey hood on her head. Peer was sitting below the end of the bedstead. Both were in frontal position, one behind the other, so that the audience could see both their faces. Unlike Aase, they could see Peer’s tense face as he was telling his tale. Aase dies, it says in the prompt script, when Peer utters the line “Here come Peer Gynt and his mother!” by the gate of Heaven; at this point Aase does not know if she will be let in or not. In the performance she showed the sign of dying after Saint Peter in Peer’s fairy-tale had refused to let her in. This was for Aase the moment of ultimate despair, the moment when, all hope gone, she gave up the ghost. What followed was: peer gynt. […] turns around and looks at aase. Why do you stare so? Aren’t you well? Angrily. Don’t lie there staring. Oh! Takes off the red bedspread he has earlier put around his head and lies down on his back. You can rest now, Grane. 9 B here retained the same idea he had in his first production. Peer, he then claimed, “cannot watch Aase die – he dares not do so – and therefore she summons the last of her strength to help him. It isn’t he who comforts her, quite the other way round” (Billquist, 1960: 232).

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Now we can unharness. Up to the bed. Stands by the bed. Thanks, mother, for all you’ve forsaken, for tales, for weal and woe. But now you may thank me back. Presses his cheek against her mouth, and puts his hand on her forehead. There! That was thanks for the ride. Puts his hand to his heart. kari enters. What? Peer! – So then it is ended, her deepest sorrow and dread. peer gynt shakes hands with kari and bows to her. kari looks at aase. Oh Lord, how well she sleeps – Looks at peer gynt. Or is she –? Looks again at aase, nods affirmingly, moves away from the bed, clasps her hands, curtsies to the dead woman, spreads the red bedspread over her. peer gynt. Let her be buried with honor. For now I’ll leave.

Even when telling his ‘good-night’ tale, B’s Peer remained concerned with himself. “Caught by his own story, the artist flees to the world of fairytales, while the clock ticks away and the mother dies, forgotten by the son,” Ellefsen wrote in Dagens Nyheter, indicating by “artist” the mental affinity between Peer and B. This Peer was primarily suppressing his own fear of death. Only after a while did he approach the dead woman and this in a rather formal way, presumably in an attempt to restrain his feelings. Peer’s contrast was Kari who unsentimentally accepted what had happened, showed reverence for the recently dead and displayed power of action. In Part Two, “Foreign Lands,” Peer first finds himself in Morocco. He has become wealthy by trading with slaves and religion (bibles). Surrounded by four gentlemen – a German, a Frenchman, an Englishman, and a Swede – he declares that in the war between Greece and Turkey he will not, like them, support Greece but Turkey, the stronger power. He is in other words willing to trade western values for less risky and more profitable eastern ones. It is business as usual. In the desert he sees an ostrich. B had an actor dressed up as an ostrich at this moment run across the stage. According to common (but false) belief, ostriches bury their heads in the sand to avoid danger. This is comparable to Peer’s tendency always to “go roundabout,” to avoid facing what opposes him head on. Dressed as a bedouin, Peer is hailed as a prophet by the sensual Anitra, another mirror figure, who trades her soul – if she has one – for

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Peer’s jewels. In Egypt he visits the singing Memnon statue and the Great Sphinx of Giza, a mythical creature with a lion‘s body and a human head, like Peer, part man, part animal. B combined the two by showing Peer in front of the huge red shadow of the Sphinx. With the assistance of Professor Begriffenfeldt Peer finally arrives in the lunatic asylum in Cairo. “So here we are,” he asks, “in the Scholar’s Club?” And Begriffenfeldt confirms that this is where “the threescore and ten Interpreters” are found, “now raised by a hundred and sixty more.” The first number refers to the authors of the Greek version of the New Testament; for the second number no satisfactory explanation has been given. B changed the first number to eighteen, the number of members of the Swedish Academy, best known for awarding the annual literary Nobel Prize, and absurdly had the insane Begriffenfeldt claim that this number had recently been increased to fifteen; this referred to the fact that three of the members of this Academy abstained from taking part in its meetings in protest against the Academy’s refusal to oppose the death penalty against Salman Rushdie. This was B’s way of finding an updated counterpart of the Swedish cowardliness satirised by Ibsen. In the asylum Peer is greeted as the emperor of the madmen. B showed him in a red dressing-gown, now seen as an imperial gown, setting him off from his all-white surroundings – as the dreamer is set off from his dream. In the asylum, Ibsen has Peer witness different types of madmen. Huhu is an advocate of national language reform, a very Norwegian situation that B could easily skip. The Fellah, on the other hand, here called the Mummycarrier Apis, was retained since his very visible adoration of the glorious past applied very much to B’s audience.10 When the Mummy-carrier, at Peer’s suggestion, not only “prepares to hang himself ” (Ibsen) but with B really hanged himself, Peer’s surprise at someone actually doing what he had been thinking of doing, the Gyntian gap between thought and deed was put into relief. Hussein, finally, is Ibsen’s satire on the Swedish Foreign Minister who thought he could deter Prussian aggression against Denmark with a flurry of diplomatic notes. Although this allusion was unintelligible to most of B’s audience, the figure of Hussein, now re-baptised The Pencil, was retained since his attitude was not at all time-bound.11 Pencil and paper belong together. Peer reveals that he is “a paper no one had written on,” a tabula 10 The Fellah is a satire on the Swedish cult of Charles XII (the Mummy). 11 He has, for example, been compared to Neville Chamberlain. One may also think of the Swedish attitude to Nazi-Germany during WW II.

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rasa. Similarly, the Pencil confesses that he has never “been sharpened” and that he now longs for a knife. Moreover, the Pencil needs someone to hold him or he cannot write. An unwritten paper is like someone who has never taken responsibility for his own life, as is a pencil that is not sharpened or is without a hand to govern it. B showed Peer and the Pencil close together. The scene culminated as follows: peer gynt with rising anguish. Hold him! the pencil puts his hand on peer gynt’s shoulder. Precisely. Hold me. Put the papers on the table. Kneeling. Screams. Don’t forget the postscript. Worn-out pencil. Lived and died… someone…held me in his hand… peer gynt bends back, screams, runs upstage. No…a sinner…whatever…something burst… Screams. I can’t remember my name…help me, guardian of all madmen! Kneels. begriffenfeldt. Look how he kneels in the dust! He is desperate! Let him be crowned! Puts a wreath of straw on peer gynt’s head. Hail him, hail the Emperor of Self! Raises peer gynt’s arms to cross-form. Triumphant shouting of the madmen turns into air-raid siren and bluish lightning.

In Act V, B’s “The Homecoming,” Peer is “on board a ship in the North Sea, off the Norwegian coast.” A storm is coming up. B opened the scene with ominous darkness and rumble. Slowly the lights came up and Peer and the Captain could be discerned. After a while the rumble ceased. In the stillness a co-passenger, never seen by Peer before, suddenly appeared next to him. The Strange Passenger, lit by a spot, looked like a corpse-carrier in his black coat, white muffler and black top hat; his face was very pale. The figure has been interpreted in different ways. Evert Sprinchorn sees him as an incarnation of the Devil.12 In B’s rendering and considering that Peer’s

12 There is in the description of the Strange Passenger, Sprinchorn claims – here quoted from Aarseth 1975: 152 – “a devil’s dossier as complete as one could ever find it. The Fiend wanders at night, raises tempests, uses the essential organs of the body in the preparation of the elixirs, has necrophagous inclinations, a cloven hoof in place of a right foot and claws in place of hands, inhabits the underworld, and frequently transforms himself into a dog […] From the satanist’s point of view the Devil is of course the light-bringer Lucifer.”

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life may shortly be at stake, it was more natural to see him as a messenger or even an incarnation of Death.13 After the ship has capsized, Peer manages to survive by clinging to the keel. The Strange Passenger again appears next to him. When he asked if Peer had ever felt “the hard grip around the throat,” B had him seize Peer’s throat with his black-gloved hand. And when Peer asked him to let go, he answered meta-theatrically: “You don’t die in the middle of the fifth act.” B retained Ibsen’s joke and expanded it by changing Peer’s “Satan’s tricks!” into “Damn theatre!” Uncomfortable reality was with greater emphasis turned into a spectacle, into something unreal. Back in Norway, Peer visits his old farmstead, now for sale. In the nightmarish auction scene the men were dressed as women and some of the women as men – a variation it seemed of the troll versus man theme – Peer beat with a drumstick, as if he was the auctioneer. The scenographer, Lennart Mörk, had created a background which showed a rubbish heap of cast-off belongings, including an arm hanging limp from the bed, as if the dead Aase was lying there. Actually she stood like a ghost by the bed and reproached her son: “A fine driver you were, Peer! The sleigh has turned over.” After the famous onion scene has revealed that Peer lacks a kernel, a true self, he is confronted with the Button-molder who maintains that Peer – like Everyman – has been no great sinner and therefore must be melted down with other faulty goods – unless he can prove that he has been “himself.” B’s Button-molder was a tall man in a long coat and with an old-fashioned police helmet on his head, linking him with the Troll King. Like a civil servant he showed Peer the paper on which he was listed as someone to be fetched. Polishing his casting ladle he seemed to prepare it for the melting of Peer. But Peer is given respite. This may give him the opportunity to find a witness who can certify that he has indeed been himself. Unfortunately the Old Man he comes across proves to be the Troll King, now in a run-down state. B had him crawl up from under the auction debris like a beggar, a simple helmet on his head indicating his decline. Peer embraced his father-in-law and tried to bribe him with a bottle of liquor. In vain. The Troll King could only prove that Peer had not been himself, that he had always been enough to himself, like a troll.

13 His sudden appearance recalls Death’s sudden appearance to the Knight in The Seventh Seal. Ibsen’s Strange Passenger may well have been an inspiration to B, whose film premiered in the same year as his first stage performance of Peer Gynt.

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At long last Peer returns to the ever-waiting Solveig, now blind as love is blind. With B she was white-haired and visibly blind.14 She was, as before, in her red dress. Wrapped around her, to indicate her maternal nature, was Aase’s brown-and-yellow blanket. Lovingly she touched the prodigal ‘son’ she no longer could see. To Peer’s burning question “where” – in hope, he does not say “if” – he had been his true self, she answers with 1 Kor. 13: 13: “In my faith, in my hope, and in my love.” B cut the following lines, including Peer’s over-explicit “You are mother and I your dreamed son” and “My mother, my wife, innocent woman.” But he retained Peer’s behaviour: “hides his face in her lap” and even amplified it by having him hide in the very bed where, in the opening, he had slept next to Aase. Mother and wife had become one. solveig half-sitting frontally in bed, softly. Sleep, my dearest boy, I shall rock you, I shall watch over you. The boy has rested at his mother’s breast his whole life’s day. God bless you, my love! Three hard knocks on the door. The boy has lain so close to my heart His whole life’s day. Now he’s tired out. Sleep, my dearest boy, I shall rock you, I shall watch over you.

Rocking him to sleep, Solveig did for Peer what he had not been able to do for his mother. The door is kicked open by the button-molder, the casting ladle in his hand. Bluish sidelight turns him into a near-silhouette outlined against the black darkness behind him. We’ll meet at the final crossroads and then we’ll see – I will come back. 14 This is a blindness, B explained, that “sees with inner eyes. And then I imagined that she had cried so much that she had turned blind” (Sjögren, 2002: 240).

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“The clock, which stood midway between the bed and the retributive figure in the doorway, had stopped ticking; its hands again indicated seven, the exact moment at which the performance had begun.”15 B’s second Peer Gynt experienced no less than 130 performances. Because of its success it was moved from the Paint Room to the Big Stage the following season. The critics were overwhelmingly very positive. But some found the antics a bit too prominent and wondered whether B’s clownish Peer possessed the potential for the existential tragedy in the last part of the ‘trilogy.’ Andréason in Göteborgs-Posten pointed to a possible problem reaching far beyond this production when he remarked that some of B’s “visual fantasies seem so complete from the start that it seems as if the actors were there mostly to fill in something already designed.” Guest performances were given in Seville, Düsseldorf, and Bergen.

15 This was how the performance ended according to Marker/Marker, 1992: 289. In the recording made a few days before the premiere, the performance ends with the clock striking seven. Most likely B changed his mind and found it more meaningful to have the clock stop ticking – signalling Peer’s death – while retaining the visual link between opening (‘birth’) and ending (death).

10. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale Already at the age of fourteen, B planned “two super-productions” for his puppet theatre: Mozart’s and Schikaneder’s opera The Magic Flute and Shakespeare’s fairy-tale drama The Winter’s Tale; both projects collapsed (B, 1994a: 3).1 The former was realised in 1975, when B’s pioneering screen version of the opera was broadcast by Swedish Television; the latter did not materialise until 1994, when his equally pioneering version of the play was performed at the Big Stage of Dramaten. The rehearsal period was for B extremely emotional: It never happens that I become emotional when I am professionallycreatively involved. In the case of The Winter’s Tale this principle didn’t hold. Already when we were blocking […] I was violently seized by emotional tumult (B, 1994a: 38).

The reason is obvious. B’s wife Ingrid, to whom he was extremely attached, was seriously ill; she died a little more than a year later. It is likely that the decision to direct The Winter’s Tale with its resurrection of the dead Hermione at the end had to do with Ingrid’s illness. After her death B both directly and indirectly, notably in his TV film Saraband, voiced the hope that he would reunite with her in after-life. Commenting on the theme of The Magic Flute, B had said: “Does Pamina still live?” The music translates the little question of the text into a big and eternal question: Does Love live? Is Love real? The answer comes quivering and hopeful: “Pa-mi-na still lives!” Love exists. Love is real in the world of man. (Mozart/Schikaneder, 1975: 34).

A closely related theme is found in The Winter’s Tale, where Leontes in the latter part of the play searches for Hermione as Tamino searches for Pamina. Reminiscing about the situation when he was planning to do the play in his puppet theatre, B once remarked that “The Winter’s Tale is about the

1 Although the interview, ascribed to Anna Salander, is presumably a fake and the interviewer none other than the director himself, the references to B’s childhood should be heeded.

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death of Love, the survival of Love and the resurrection of Love. It was the resurrection that broke me” (B, 1994a: 38). Not only the theme of The Magic Flute but also the handling of it has a close affinity with that of The Winter’s Tale. In the opera, B says in the program attached to the LP recording of it: It is the wonderful suddenness of the fairy tale and the dream that we may experience.... The sweetness of the dream but also the pain and longing of the dream.... the people in the play ask themselves if they are dreaming or are awake – if this is a dream or reality.... “If it is not fiction, then it is a dream,” as Strindberg says in A Dream Play. (Mozart/Schikaneder, 1975: 21f.) B had asked Britt G. Hallqvist and Claes Schaar to provide a new Swedish translation of The Winter’s Tale. Again he demanded that the text be actable, sayable, and understandable. A comparison with the old Swedish renderings of the play reveals that the new translation radically differs from them precisely in this respect. Naturally, this has often resulted in a certain simplification of the meaning and a diminishing of the poetical qualities (the blank verse). But these losses must be weighed against the increased accessibility of the text. Shakespeare’s text – the translators used the Arden edition – is divided into five acts. We move from King Leontes’ Sicily (Acts I-III.2) to King Polixenes’ Bohemia (Acts III.3-IV.4), and from there – with a time lapse of no less than sixteen years – back to Sicily (Act V). Disregarding the act division, B divided the play into 11 scenes: Sicily, winter. 1. The park of King Leontes’ palace. 2. Queen Hermione’s salon. 3. Outside Hermione’s prison. 4. The park of the palace. 5. The court room. Bohemia, spring. 6. Wild coast. Intermission Bohemia, spring, summer. 7. Pastoral landscape. Spring. 8. Pastoral landscape. Midsummer.

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Sicily, summer. 9. Cloister. 10. The park of the palace. 11. Art gallery in Paulina’s house.

Actually Scenes 7 and 8 were Bohemian only in a figurative sense; if anything, the pastoral environment of these scenes was located in the heartland of Sweden, the province of Dalarna. Approximately half of Shakespeare’s text was omitted. Leaving out a couple of courtiers, B on the other hand added two women to the cast: Amalia, lady in waiting to Queen Hermione, and the Abbess at the cloister. The latter took over one of Cleomenes’ speeches, while Cleomenes took over some of Camillo’s and the third Courtier’s speeches. More than is usually the case, the performance began, as it were, with the theatre program, where B pretended to be the translator of a letter, written in 1925 by a German professor, who was returning a nineteenth-century theatre poster to the Royal Library of Stockholm. The poster, reproduced in the program, announced that The Winter’s Tale, directed by Mr Richard Furumo, would be performed as part of Miss Ulrika Sofia’s birthday celebration, on December 28, in the grand salon of Hugo Löwenstierna’s hunting castle. By this counterfeit on B’s part, the audience, many of whom would be familiar with the work of Carl Jonas Love Almqvist – one of the leading Romantic writers in Sweden – was forewarned that the play they were going to witness would be placed within an early nineteenth-century frame. In one of his works, Jaktslottet (The Hunting Castle), quoted in the program, Almqvist has Frans Löwenstierna explain to his brother Henrik that their father Hugo has invented “a kind of plays which he wants to call Songes (Dreams) to be performed during autumn and winter evenings. The theatre – the yellow salon, the length of which is suitable for this purpose – is arranged so that a curtain of white gauze is hung in the middle of the room, dividing it into two parts.... This curtain will never be raised. We spectators are sitting on one side of the gauze. On the other side, furthest back the dream takes place. (Shakespeare, 1994: 11f.)

Unlike Hugo Löwenstierna, B chose not to separate the audience from the performance but, on the contrary, to integrate them as much as possible. Setting the play in Löwenstierna’s salon, B created a complex Droste effect. The Stockholm audience were introduced to an early nineteenthcentury evening of entertainment, the main part of which consisted in the

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presentation of The Winter’s Tale, witnessed also by the nineteenth-century members of the Löwenstierna family and their guests. As amateurs some of them incarnated Shakespearean characters living in an unspecified period. At the same time, scenery, properties, and many of the costumes signalled early twentieth century, the time when Dramaten was built. Approaching Strindberg’s concept in A Dream Play, where “time and space do not exist,” B in his version of The Winter’s Tale created a dreamlike “synthetic theatre time” (Zern in Dagens Nyheter). As designed by scene designer Lennart Mörk, Löwenstierna’s horseshoeshaped salon, imitating the form of the auditorium, was a replica of the beautiful art noveau foyer of Dramaten. As a result, the audience found itself in a space between two areas mirroring one another, one meant for performance, the other for relaxation between the acts. The scenery in this way contributed to wipe out the borderline between stage and auditorium; at the same time it created an unreal, dreamlike effect. To strengthen the feeling of communion between the people on either side of the proscenium, the Löwenstierna family and their guests appeared happily chatting in the staged salon, while the real audience were arriving to take their seats. The actor representing Almqvist sat down at one of the two square pianos. A conjurer entertained with a trick. A female choir sang one of Almqvist’s Songes. There was music and dancing. After a while some of the party participants – the host, Hugo Löwenstierna, being one of them – walked down the steps installed at the front of the stage and sat down in the first row, thereby turning themselves into members of the real audience. After some ten minutes two children – a boy and a girl – with bells in their hands announced that the performance was to begin.2 Suddenly a boy with a comic mask and a girl with a tragic one slowly dragged a blue sofa from the back of the stage to the front. Almqvist’s and the audience’s world, Zern (1996: 55) points out, changed to Shakespeare’s “through a piece of blocking similar to a camera tracking.” A film director was here at work. Hugo Löwenstierna changed his tails for Leontes’ long blue robe and Richard Furumo, Löwenstiernas guest, for Polixenes’ long green dress. The scenery in The Winter’s Tale, now to be performed, had an Elizabethan simplicity: a beautiful art nouveau sofa, a big dinner table, a few painted screens, a wind machine visibly cranked, writhing veiled women representing a stormy sea on which a tiny model of a sailing ship was being tossed. 2 The sudden highlighting of the two children surrounded by festive family members which recalled the beginning of Fanny and Alexander prepared for Mamillius’ central role in the performance.

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As with Shakespeare, the first part of B’s play was set in winter. But while Shakespeare’s pastoral scenes play in late summer or even early autumn, B here settled for spring and summer. The reason is obvious. Having relocated these scenes from Bohemia to Dalarna, midsummer being the most carnivalesque time of the year in Sweden, would have a particularly strong emotional impact on the audience. Shakespeare’s sheep-shearing feast gave way to midsummer celebration. Shakespeare’s seasonal development reflects the inner change that the protagonist, Leontes, undergoes in the course of the play, which essentially deals with the death, survival, and resurrection of his love for his wife Hermione. This connection was strengthened in B’s version, where in the production script we move from “Winter afternoon” (Scene 2) to “Sharp winter” (Scene 3) to “Cold winter day with snow falling” (Scene 4). In the performance, the lighting, similarly, accompanied Leontes’ inner development. When his jealousy was kindled, the windows were lit deepred. Later, when his love for Hermione had died, or rather lay dormant, a cold winter night with a starry sky and a frosty moon above snow-clad trees could be glimpsed outside the windows.3 Scenery and costumes in the 19th century frame action were kept in the Swedish national colours – in conformance with the blue of Dramaten’s curtain and chairs and the yellow of its proscenium and balconies. In the play-within-the-play, blue and black characterised Leontes and his men in the early part; as a penitentiary he later changed to white. Hermione, Perdita, and Florizel were in red, the colour of blood, life, and love. While Shakespeare’s play seems set in a pre-Christian period, B made use of a marked Christian frame of reference, especially in the Almqvist songs with which the action was interspersed. (In either case the text contained a number of anachronisms.) It is no coincidence that B’s play-within-the-play was supposed to be performed on the day that the Catholic church used to celebrate as the Holy Innocents’ Day, commemorating Herod’s killing of the infants of Bethlehem (Mat. 2: 6); hereby it was suggested that Leontes was another Herod, while Mamillius and Perdita corresponded to the victimised Bethlehem children. The Christmas tree in the wintry part was carried over in the cruciform maypole in the midsummer part; this again was developed into the cruciform of the Holy Virgin in Scene 9. The suddenness of Leontes’ unjustif ied jealousy is a classical and crucial problem confronting every director of The Winter’s Tale (Pafford in Shakespeare, 1993a: lviff.). Shakespeare has Polixenes visit Leontes for 3 Ingamaj Beck in Dramat, 3, 1994: 30.

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nine months to make it possible that he could be the father of Hermione‘s child. In performances, her state of pregnancy is usually indicated from the beginning. B let it initially be invisible. Modern directors, Stephen Orgel (in Shakespeare, 1996: 22) points out, sometimes make Hermione and Polixenes behave strikingly intimate toward each other to justify Leontes’ jealousy. B was one of them. When the play-within-the play opened, Hermione was sitting on the blue art nouveau sofa between her husband Leontes and their guest Polixenes, Leontes’ childhood friend. She was in red, Leontes in blue, Polixenes in green. Hermione was so friendly with both men that it was difficult to tell whether this was a ‘matrimonial’ sofa or a sofa meant for a ménage à trois. 4 Confirming his intention to return to his own Bohemia the following day, Polixenes had been provided with a red guest book, a very Swedish custom, in which he had just finished writing. The book was handed over to Hermione. After a while, Leontes snapped the book from her, looked into it, and abruptly closed it. Hermione, declaring her love for her husband, put her arms around Leontes’ neck, while imploring Polixenes to stay with them for some time. Leontes opened the book again and continued to read, then suddenly got up, threw the book on the sofa and left. Here was suggested, it seemed, that Polixenes had praised Hermione in writing to such an extent that Leontes’ jealousy, aroused already by her intimacy with his friend, was kindled. Leontes returned and hid himself behind the sofa, spying on Hermione and Polixenes. What he heard served to increase his suspicions: hermione....We freely admit the sins we [women] have seduced you [men] to, if you first sinned with us, and then remained with us and never slipped.5 leontes up behind the sofa with a “Boo!” hermione and polixenes, who have been sitting close together, surprised fall away from one another.

4 In A Doll’s House, Nora finds herself emotionally torn between her husband and the couple’s old friend Rank. It is tempting to see a spill-over from B’s production of this play to his Winter’s Tale, especially since both women were played by the same actress. 5 Cf., with regard to accessibility, the original, where the corresponding passage reads: Th’offences we have made you do, we’ll answer, If you first sinn’d with us, and that with us You did continue fault, and that you slipp’d not With any but with us. (Act I.2)

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Hearing that Polixenes had complied with Hermione’s prayer that he remain in Sicily for a while, Leontes now placed himself on the sofa between Hermione and Polixenes, turning his back on the latter, who looked away to the right. When Hermione put her red shawl around Leontes’ neck it was on her part a lovingly playful gesture which, however, was experienced by him as though he was being ensnared. With her shawl around his neck, Leontes, alone on the front stage, suffocatingly spoke his Too hot! Too hot! To go too far in friendship, that is the same as mingling blood.

This soliloquy is usually regarded as the first indication in the text of Leontes’ jealousy; in B’s version it was, as we have seen, preceded by several motivating pointers. Shortly after his jealous outburst, Leontes characteristically put the red shawl next to the red book and sat down on both of them. Highly pregnant with meaning was the situation when Polixenes and Hermione were seen lovingly dancing in the background while Leontes told Camillo: You think I am so muddy, so unsettled that I myself have caused my suffering....

At this moment, it was suggestively unclear, Christina Lundberg in Sundsvalls Tidning noted, whether the dancing in the background was an objective event or a subjective projection of Leontes’ jealousy. When Leontes a little later, Lahr (1994: 106) observed, glimpses Hermione and Polixenes circled in [the] dance... a rush of stabbing anguish overcomes him; Leontes breaks into the circle, casting Polixenes out and embracing Hermione. He holds her at arm’s length while she nestles his hand gently against her cheek. Suddenly, Leontes whispers something obscene to her, and Hermione breaks away. Leontes grabs a nearby female member of the court and begins to rape her.

Beyond the need to revenge himself by humiliating his wife even more than she had – as he believed – humiliated him, this sudden outburst of passion and violence seemed to visualise less “the middle-aged king’s unconscious terror of impotence” (ibid.) than, in B’s fairy-tale-like terms, “the death of Love.” Much of what took place between the three main parties within B’s central magic rectangle had its proxemic and kinetic counterpart in the area

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outside it. Using one of Anna Pavlova’s so-called social dances, suited for the balls of the bourgeoisie, as well as various elements from Antony Tudor, choreographer Donya Feuer had the dancers move – and at strategic moments freeze their movements – like blue-grey shadows in patterns hinting at the subliminal drama that was being enacted at centre forestage. At the same time, the dancing couples helped to expand – universalise – the manwoman relations demonstrated by the three chief characters – especially when these left their central, well-lit, space and joined the dancers in the outer, dimmed area. Characteristic of his concerns in later years was B’s preoccupation with children in his productions. The expansion of Prince Mamillius’ part is a case in point. Early in Scene 1, the boy was seen playing with his puppet theatre, identical with little Alexander’s in Fanny and Alexander, both representing the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen with its motto “Not Only for Pleasure” inscribed above the proscenium opening. The scenery in Mamillius’ puppet theatre was that of the salon surrounding it. Moreover, this little theatre, figuring inside a theatre (Dramaten), had another puppet theatre on its stage, this again a puppet theatre on its stage (Lennart Mörk in Rosenqvist, 1994: 26). Linking the play with the film, Mamillius with Alexander, B by this second Droste effect brought together the boy playing with his theatre and the grown-ups – both on the stage and in the auditorium – busying themselves with theirs. With Shakespeare, Prince Mamillius is sickened to death either because he cannot stand his father’s harsh treatment of his mother or because, like Hamlet, he cannot bear “the supposed sin of his mother and consequent taint upon himself” (Pafford in Shakespeare, 1993a: lxxxii). Mamillius’ sad fate is included in the play mainly to demonstrate the far-reaching consequences of Leontes’ jealousy. With B he was a boy of ten played by a girl, that is, an ‘androgynous’ and therefore representative child. His hair was reddish like that of Leontes’ – sufficient proof, it would seem, that Leontes was indeed his father. Yet like Strindberg’s Captain in The Father – several critics noted the resemblance – Leontes had doubts about his parenthood. Mamillius’ loyalty to both parents was indicated both in his costume and in his attitude to them. Like Leontes he wore a blue dress in Scene 1; like Hermione he was dressed in red in Scene 2. Intuitively sensing that something was awry in their marriage, he was seen early in the play moving away from his puppet theatre to the sofa where he eavesdropped on his parents’ conversation with Polixenes. A little later, he was happily sitting on his father’s lap – until Leontes brutally pushed him away. In Scene 2, similarly, he was comfortably resting with his mother – until Leontes tore

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him away from her. Shortly after this, he was again seen eavesdropping when Leontes called his wife a whore. In Scene 3, he was seen outside his mother’s prison, suffering with her. In his description of the dilemma in which a child of disagreeing parents finds itself – a situation vividly experienced by little Ingmar6 – B gradually added visual information that would motivate what in his version might be seen as a ‘suicide’ on Mamillius’ part, this child-Hamlet who, as Olle Grönstedt in NU put it, was hit by “too great a sorrow too early.” In the middle of the play (Act III.2) Hermione is condemned to imprisonment although the Oracle in Delphi has declared her innocent. In B’s court room, lit by bluish light, Leontes, dressed in black, was standing on the huge judicial table, acting the part of self-imposed public prosecutor. Behind him the Judge, in red, was sitting. On either side of him court officers in black were seen. Behind the Judge a crowd of soldiers and members of the community were seen, dressed in common grey. After Leontes had accused his wife of infidelity and high treason, Hermione climbed the table. In her speech of defence she declared: You know, although you would not admit it, that I have always been as faithful as I am now sad. Stands up. To Leontes. Look at me! To the members of the community. Look at me! To the audience in the auditorium. Look at me!

The original’s single “behold me” was thus rendered, less solemnly, three times. The echo of Pilate’s “Behold the man!” (John 19: 5) seemed obvious; Hermione was as innocent as Jesus. Shortly after Hermione has heard that her son Mamillius has died, she dies herself. To save her baby from Leontes’ wrath, Paulina’s husband Antigonus brings the baby to Bohemia. Upon arriving there he has a dream in which he sees Hermione. As soon as Antigonus in his soliloquy relates that in a dream he has seen “the mother of the child” he has saved, B had Hermione appear behind him, in a “blood-red dress” and with chains around her hands, the way she had appeared in the court scene. She told Antigonus

6 Compare, for example, little Ingmar and Mamillius witnessing a row between their parents; B’s father’s and Leontes’ momentary inclination to kill themselves; the dead mother as seemingly alive and the ‘resurrection’ of Hermione (B, 1989: 7, 17).

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that Leontes believed that the baby was lost forever. “Therefore give her the name Perdita!” With Shakespeare, Leontes’ repentance – after sixteen years – is demonstrated in V.1, usually set in his palace. No doubt recalling the Stranger’s penance in the asylum scene of Strindberg’s To Damascus, staged by him twenty years earlier, B instead set the scene in a cloister, showing Leontes, crushed, surrounded by virginal nuns, representatives of that which he had violated. Leontes was seen with his back, streaked with blood, turned to the audience, prostrate in front of a life-like image of the Bleeding Madonna, a sword plunged into her heart, to Leontes an image of the wife he felt he had killed. When Paulina in the Swedish text reproaches him for what he has done, Leontes submissively answers: It is true. Killed! I have killed her, yes, but how you hurt me with those words! If they are bitter in your mouth, then they are much more bitter in my thoughts. Please say them seldom!

Showing Leontes as a flagellant, B replaced the escapist “seldom” with the masochist “often.” While the penance scene fittingly was set in a cloister, the resurrection scene was staged in a secular environment: Paulina’s art gallery, at night. Statues in white togas and with masks on their faces and lit lanterns in their hands entered the stage, anticipating what was about to happen. Hermione, a statuesque figure,7 was carried in on a catafalque, which was placed in the middle of the room. paulina.... Music, awake her! (Almqvist’s Songe No. XV is hummed in the distance.) The time has come. Be stone no more! (hermione moves.) Look, she moves! (Silence. hermione raises herself to sitting position.) Be not afraid! What she is doing is as holy as my conjuring is good.

7 Cf. Kermode 2000: 274: “the stone is supposed to be cold, yet it stands for the Queen’s warm life. It comes to Leontes that it is he who is as cold as the stone.”

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As in The Magic Flute, music worked the magic at the hands of someone steadfast in love. Providing the scene with a richness of overtones, B was not suggesting that Paulina, who knew that Hermione had merely been hidden away for sixteen years, was performing a trick – as did the conjurer appearing in the pre-play sequence. Rather, he was suggesting that the long survival of love, expressed through wordless art and music, could miraculously lead to its resurrection. The Songe that was hummed in the distance was the one that was sung in the beginning, bridging the pre-play and the play proper. This Songe, called “The Flower of the Heart,” relates a parable in simple words. God has planted a colourless rose in the heart of man; its thorns wound the heart. When the heart asks God why He has done so, God answers: “The blood from your heart colours your rose for you. / You and the rose of your heart then resemble Me in beauty.” Suffering in imitatio Christi is the way to salvation. This meaning tied in with Leontes’ sixteen years of penance, emblematised in his flagellated back, red with blood. Suddenly the red colour of Hermione’s and Mamillius’ costumes in the beginning of the play gained a deeper meaning. For the noble Paulina, Shakespeare’s play ends happily. Having lost her husband, she marries Camillo. This solution was not open to B, since he had gradually turned Camillo into a Catholic priest. Instead, he chose an ending where the attention was strongly focussed upon the reunion of Leontes, Hermione, and Perdita – husband, wife, and daughter: hermione slowly, gropingly. Tell me, my child, how were you saved, and where have you been? How did you find the way to your father’s house? perdita puts her head in hermione’s lap. paulina up to the trio, puts one hand on leontes’ shoulder, the other on perdita’s. Tell about that, you may do later. You fortunate people, go now and share your triumph with one and all! Moves to the right. I, old turtle, will fly away to some withered bough, where I will lament my husband, whom I have lost, until the end of life. leontes shaking his head. No! No! No! Dear Paulina, Up to her, embraces her, takes her left hand and touches her behind

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hermione and Perdita. accompany us now to some place where we in peace and quiet, with questions and with answers, may learn of what has happened to us all in this long period that we’ve been separated. Come, Reaches his hand out to hermione who rises. perdita takes her right hand. hermione lets leontes’ hand loose and takes both perdita’s hands, then takes leontes’ hand again. come with us. They turn away from the audience and are about to leave upstage when the housemaid enters from right. Excuse me, Your Excellency, but the supper is served since quite some time. löwenstierna, who has been sitting in the middle of the front row, witnessing the performance, enters the stage. Happy mealtime music. Most of the people, who have taken part in the performance whirl around on the stage, now out of their roles. A white-dressed girl jokingly sits down on the catafalque, where hermione has just been raised from the dead. Exeunt all except the singer. Starlit night, strong moonlight through the windows. singer sitting downstage right, sings a capella Almqvist’s Songe No. 1. O my Lord, how beautiful to hear music from a holy angel’s mouth. O my Lord, how lovely, to die in music and in song. Quietly flow, o my soul, in the river, the dark and heavenly purple river. time, a white-haired lady in a black crinoline with a red train enters the stage from the auditorium with a big alarm clock. Quietly sink, o my blessed spirit, into the arms of God, comforting and good. time puts down the ticking alarm clock on the forestage. It shows five to twelve. O my Lord, how beautiful to hear music from a holy angel’s mouth. O my Lord, how lovely, to die in music and in song. time leaves upstage. Black-out. The ticking of the clock grows louder.

By having Time appear in Act IV.1 and reappear at the end of the performance as an elderly woman wearing both the colour of life and of death, and

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by providing her with an alarm clock8 instead of an hour glass, B ended his Winter’s Tale with a sound that, like the allegorical figure herself, bridged stage and auditorium and fused the two areas into a theatrum mundi, in recognition of the fact that we are all ruled by the Clock of Life and that the silence of darkness awaits us all. The critical reception was overwhelming and the presentation of Shakespeare’s fairy-tale drama within a 19th century Swedish framework was generally praised. B regarded it himself as his most important production and the one “closest to his heart” (Sjögren, 2002: 184). Because the stage design was closely linked to the Dramaten bulding, guest performances became virtually impossible. Nevertheless there was one in New York.

8

In Sweden the speaking clock Fröken Ur (Miss Clock) on the radio has always been a woman.

11. J.B.P. Molière, The Misanthrope When B produced his second Misanthrope, he gave two reasons for doing it: “It’s hard to say why I love The Misanthrope. If you definitely can say that you love a woman, you have stopped loving her, right? Perhaps I have a misanthrope inside me?” When he produced the play for the third time, in 1995, there was an added reason; in the theatre program it says: In 1957 I staged The Misanthrope at Malmö City Theatre, in 1973 at the Royal [Theatre] in Copenhagen. In 1978 I experienced Ariane Mnouchkine’s imperishable master film about Molière. I realized that I had not earlier understood. Hence this third attempt. In deep collegiate gratitude I wish to dedicate this Misanthrope to Ariane Mnouchkine.

B left it to the audience to guess what he had earlier not understood but now, in his third attempt, apparently had comprehended. He later indicated that Alceste should be done not as a young rebel but as “an aging man” who has suffered a “bitter fiasco” (Sjögren, 2002: 143). Yet in his 1995 production Alceste was on the contrary remarkably young. The new insight applied instead to Célimène. To Andréason in Göteborgs-Posten it meant that the traditional picture of her was turned around. “Instead of a pleasure-seeking devil she is a woman who has seen through the men’s vanity and stupidity.” The Misanthrope is an enigmatic play, open to various interpretations. B abstained from the rather strongly period-oriented approaches he had applied in his earlier productions and was, as we shall see, this time more interested in updating the play. The production became a suggestive floating between 17th century costumes and manners, and 20th century allusions on a bare, universal stage. Fundamental was of course Alceste‘s and Célimène’s contrasting experience of life; they are in that respect “each other’s halves” (Sjöman, 1969: 92). Responsible for the new translation was Hans Alfredson, a well-known writer, actor, and cabaretier in Sweden. The classical alexandrine used in Le Misanthrope is a twelve-syllable line, in which each syllable is separately pronounced, and given equal weight. The lines rhyme aa bb cc dd ff etc. In his translation, Alfredson remarks in the theatre program, he resorts to what he calls “softened alexandrines” rhyming abc abc de de ff. Indicating another translation problem, he notes that rhyming in French, where many words have the same ending, is easier than in Swedish.

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Like Swedish, French has two pronouns of address, the formal vous and the informal tu. In Le Misanthrope all the characters use the formal pronoun. Adjusting to this, Alfredson consistently renders vous as ni. But in the performance B had the friends Alceste and Philinte and the lovers Alceste and Célimène address each other with the informal du. This meant updating the play while at the same time make these intimate forms clash with the 17th century costumes. Célimène surrounds herself with a number of men courting her without showing an obvious preference for any of them; they are equal even in her way of addressing them. This pattern was upset in the performance where Alceste was privileged by means of the intimate address. B provided a translation with substantial deletions and changes The purpose of this was either thematic, stylistic or simply in order to increase intelligibility. Some of the changes were a natural consequence of passages having been deleted. The performance opened with the ordinary curtain rising only to reveal another curtain. Reproduced on this second or inner curtain was Watteau’s La Partie carrée,1 from circa 1713. The painting depicts two young women and a young man, all in elegant silk costumes, seated in an aristocratic garden. In front of them stands a white-dressed Pierrot with a guitar slung over his back. The attention of the three seated figures concerns Pierrot. Did the painting visualie an unequal rivalry between the two men? Or did it rather suggest the fascination of the three ‘ordinary’ figures for the theatrical one, the fascination of an ‘audience’ for a ‘performer’ anticipating what was soon to take place? Talking and laughter was heard from behind the curtain mirroring what was going on in front of it in the auditorium, providing a sound link between stage and audience. Visually and aurally a teatrum mundi had been created. Suddenly, the Pierrot of the painting was seen standing leaning against the wings with his gaze fixed on the audience, absolutely quiet–a real life Pierrot. We understand he is one of the company who in just a minute will start to perform The Misanthrope on the main stage of the Royal Dramatic Theatre” (Zern in Dagens Nyheter).

After the two curtains had risen, the performance opened with a choreographic prelude by Donya Feuer in Célimène’s salon where most of the action was to unfold. On the green square carpet, with a black three-partite 1

The title refers to a party consisting of four people, in this case two men and two women.

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sofa as the only piece of furniture, the eight main characters were seen, immobile for a few seconds. Célimène was fittingly in a central position, Alceste to the left in his simple dark-blue dress markedly different from the colourful, vain, and feminine-looking costumes of the other men. Behind Célimène, Pierrot held up a bandage. When he blindfolded her all the others began to move around her to elegant harpsichord music by Scarlatti. The game of Blind Man’s Buff had begun,2 a children’s game in which the ‘blind’ person tries to identify the one he or she has caught by touching his or her hair, face, clothes, etc. Célimène walked from one to the other in the circle around her, beginning with Alceste, and finally stopped by Oronte, whom she identified. At this moment, Alceste ran to the corner downstage left. Off came her bandage. All participants applauded. Célimène’s undecisive moving around, her choice of Oronte and Alceste’s desperate reaction to it – everything foreshadowed her indecision regarding her suitors and Alceste’s fear that she would choose his most dangerous rival. The game finished, everyone walked toward the curtained door upstage into an inner room, where a decked table indicated that this was the diningroom where dinner was going to be served. Unwilling to join the others, Alceste still remained in his corner until two of the women forced him to go with them to the dining room. But seconds later he broke away and rushed back to the salon, where he unheroically stumbled and fell downstage centre. His “best friend” Philinte appeared, a red book in his hand, and tried to persuade Alceste to behave in accordance with social decorum. At this point Molière’s play begins. The reason for Alceste’s dismissing first line – “Leave me alone!” – though in hindsight highly characteristic of his misanthropic nature, remains somewhat cryptic to the recipient. Why is he so unfriendly toward his friend at this moment? B provided a reasonable explanation in the little dumbshow preceding the actual action. Célimène’s ‘choice’ of Oronte had seriously hurt him. His falling was the result of inner turbulence. His “Leave me alone!” was the reaction of someone who had not won the game and was sorry for himself. His stage position at this moment was anticipatory. B’s 2 The inspiration for this may well have come from Ibsen’s The Wild Duck where Gregers Werle at the end of Act I, pointing to the inner room, tells his father that the guests “are playing Blind Man’s Buff with Mrs Sörby,” his father’s new wife. The erotic implication is obvious. The Wild Duck was produced by B at Dramaten in 1972. Gregers was played by the same actor, Max von Sydow, who had earlier done Alceste in B’s 1957 production of The Misanthrope. In the prompt script for his second production of the play B had significantly written “Gregers” (Marker/Marker, 1992: 167).

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Alceste, Zern (1996: 64) remarked, often positioned himself on the forestage as if he was evicted – or had evicted himself – from the social world of the court. Downstage he was in eye contact with the audience, seeking support, as it were, from them. When it appeared that Alceste had hurt his knee, Philinte gave him his napkin to serve as a bandage. A bandage now linked Célimène and Alceste. In the following Alceste often paid attention to his knee. It indicated at once his egocentricity and his unwillingness to listen to Philinte whom he kept criticising for his hypocritical attitude to his fellow men. B strengthened Alceste’s criticism by having him regard Philinte as equally corrupt as everyone else. Alceste’s I detest their exaggerated friendliness, the crude flatter, the tone of voice when they talk.

became I detest this exaggerated friendliness, the crude flatter, the tone of voice when you (ni) talk. (my italics)

Alceste here naturally addressed Philinte. But in the following lines – What kind of strange world is this in which we live, where openness in conversation is considered misplaced? Where anyone may call anyone his friend? Damn it! I call such falsehood swinishness!

– delivered downstage centre, he addressed the audience. By changing the addressee in this way the audience was suddenly included in this “strange world”; by implication it too was made the butt of Alceste’s criticism. Tired of Alceste’s constant grumbling and unable to change his mind, Philinte sat down on the sofa. His static position markedly contrasted with Alceste’s restless mobility. Telling his friend that although he noticed as many human frailties around him as Alceste, Philinte preferred, he said, “to close his eyes.” To indicate his non-involvement B had him read his book. Sitting down next to Philinte, Alceste tried to stir him with a hypothetic example: A close friend betrays you recklessly and coolly and says that you have Leans toward philinte, pokes his breast. perverse preferences. philinte turns away.

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In the prompt script B at this point notes: “It could be that Philinte is homosexual. So this is an unpleasant subject.” This would help explain Philinte’s extreme loyalty to Alceste whose views so radically differed from his own. After a while, the roles were reversed. Alceste remained sitting while Philinte shut his book, stood up and, standing above Alceste, asked him: “Will the lady’s faults be forgiven, if she is very pretty?” He was ironically referring to the discrepancy between Alceste’s rejection of hypocrisy and slander on one hand and his infatuation with the “cold, gossipy, coquette Célimène” on the other. He had thereby, at the end of the first scene, pointed to the central crevice in Alceste’s armour. When he asked him why he was so jealous “of his most stupid rival,” Oronte, dressed in a black, richly gold-ornate juste-au-corps and with an absurdly high wig indicating his stuck-up nature, stole from the dining-room pompously raising his legs, then made his exit to the left. Here was the rival just referred to. When Oronte re-entered with a loud “There you are!” addressed to Alceste, the audience that had already seen him realised how false his greeting was; Oronte had calculatingly chosen his moment and manner of entrance. As soon as he noticed Oronte, Alceste hurried downstage left in the hope to escape him. There he pretended not to hear Oronte’s flattering. This did not stop Oronte. After embracing and cheek-kissing Alceste, he declared: “I will gladly help, if I may, /introducing you Whispering in alceste’s ear. to the royal court.” Behind Oronte’s back, fully visible to the audience, Philinte, upstage right, was at this moment gesturing to Alceste that he should accept Oronte’s offer to help, but Alceste’s counter-gesture indicated the opposite. Oronte had come to ask for Alceste‘s opinion about a sonnet he had just written. “I know that your taste is good,” the text has it. B strengthened this to a flattering and self-flattering: “you are yourself a writer.” With his flattering of Alceste and his offer to help him at the King’s court, Oronte thought he had prepared for a positive reaction to his sonnet. But Alceste reacted differently. He did not wish to judge the poem: alceste. Spare me! oronte. Why? alceste. Because I am honest. And honesty can sometimes be rather awful. Pause. oronte. But that is precisely what I want. I want to hear everything!

Oronte was flabbergasted by Alceste’s warning. How react to this? The pause indicated that he needed time to come up with a suitable, shrewd answer.

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The situation was highly comical since it meant that in his (pretended) candour Oronte was outdoing the advocate of absolute sincerity. For the recital of the sonnet Oronte fluttered with a paper as if it was a fan, backed a few steps to reach a higher, more impressive level. From this platform he declared that the title of the sonnet was “The Hope” and that it was about “a woman.” With crossed arms – a frequent, self-embracing position with him – Alceste, looking frontally, indicated his emotional distance to the recital. When Oronte declared that he had written the poem in fifteen minutes, Alceste in protest made his exit. Philinte by contrast exclaimed: “Fantastic!” The first lines of the poem read in relatively literal English translation (Molière, 2008: 219): Hope, it is true, alleviates our woe, And helps us for a moment to endure. But, Phyllis, this advantage brings us low, If nothing further comes to bring a cure.3

In the performance the lines were replaced by: I hope you’ll be my queen of heart! My trouser swells from ruttish smart. Oh, Phyllis, be monogamous at last and be just mine – and fast.

Instead of expressing longing for acceptance by the beloved, suitable for presentation in an aristocratic salon, B’s audience was offered a coarse picture of sexual urge. Although it seems unlikely that Oronte would expect praise for such crudeness, B ignored this aspect and instead stressed the erotic rivalry between the two men; the hinted-at polygamy of Phyllis/Célimène fitted into this pattern. The hypocritical manners in the salon were in fact often undercut by demonstrations of crude reality. Below the artificially refined veneer the characters incidentally revealed their beastly nature. In his judgment of the poem Alceste is not harshly straightforward, as one would have expected both from his proclaimed morals and from the 3 In the original the lines read: L’éspoir, il est vrai, nous soulage Et nous berce un temps notre ennui; Mais, Philis, le triste avantage, Lorsque rien ne marche après lui!

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warning he had just given Oronte that he would be an honest judge. Instead of attacking the poem directly, he invents a story about a friend who had written a poor poem to be judged by Alceste. His criticism of Oronte’s poem in this way becomes oblique. Time and again Oronte makes it clear that he sees through Alceste’s dodge and asks for his sincere opinion: “Your message is, if I have understood you rightly / that I should simply stop writing poems.” But Alceste remains devious with his repeated: “I haven’t said that.” The roles are comically reversed. The hypocrite asks for sincerity, the sincere man becomes hypocritical. When Alceste declared that he hated “the tastelessness of our time, so coarse and gaudy” and praised “the ingeniousness of our ancestors,” their “naturalness and simplicity,” he was standing downstage, looking straight at the audience. The message hereby got a double addressee. The 17th century was fused with the 20th. Exemplifying what he means Alceste twice recites a poem which in English has been rendered as: If the King had sold me cheap His great town of Paree [Paris], But I was not allowed to keep My darling there with me, I’d say to King Henri: “Take back your great Paree. For I would rather sleep, And my own dear with me.” (Molière 2008: 222)

This simple “old love song” – Alceste‘s characterisation in a deleted line – was replaced by the translator with the first and last stanzas of a poem by the 17th century German poet Angelus Silesius; in English, the last stanza reads: His [God’s] spirit’s western wind touches your warm cheek. The urge of love is strong; be the flower on his ground.

Molière stylistically contrasts two love poems. The performance contrasted two kinds of love, the poet’s crude sexual longing for his beloved and God’s love for mankind. Stylistically, the lack of talent in either of the poems in the original was in the performance replaced by the aesthetic discrepancy between Oronte’s flat sonnet and Silesius’ artistic poem. By first singing

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Silesius’ stanza, then reciting it, Alceste indicated its hymn-like nature. Especially at this point Alceste, “in his dark-blue coat and with white around his neck,” looked like “an adept of Schartau among gaudy peacocks” (Andréason in Göteborgs-Posten). 4 The five acts in Molière’s comedy are all set in Célimène’s salon. B moved Act II to Célimène’s bedroom. Mid-stage was a double bed with canopy. In it Célimène was having breakfast, while Alceste, in white nightcap and nightshirt, was reading the red book he seemed to have taken over from Philinte.5 Basque and Dorine were tittering with Célimène. Her social communion contrasted with Alceste’s isolation. The elegance of the surroundings was somewhat disturbed when Basque left with a chamber pot. After a while Alceste got irritated and stood up, left the room but quickly returned, now in a dressing gown and without nightcap. Sitting down on a chair, he brusquely addressed Célimène: “Now I wish to have it out with you!” But very soon he was back in bed, admitting that “a glance from you makes my whole body warm.” He nevertheless continued to blame her for having had too many men; the text more mildly speaks of merely having looked at too many of them. Mirroring herself in the big mirror Dorine had just brought in, Célimène rejoined that her smiling to all the men courting her ought to please Alceste more than her falling for one of them. Threatened with this possibility, Alceste dropped his book, gave a roar and left the room, slamming the door behind him – only to return immediately. When Célimène blamed him for constantly nagging at her, Alceste, putting her on his lap, assured her that the nagging would end after they had seriously talked everything out. As he was saying this, Célimène willingly stretched out to let him kiss her body all over. They were abruptly interrupted by Basque’s announcement that Acaste had come to pay a visit. Célimène at once happily jumped up and let Dorine put a peignoir around her. When the arrival of yet another of Célimène’s admirers, Clitandre, was announced, Alceste found it high time to leave the room. Kneeling before him, Célimène in a caressing voice entreated him to stay. He refused. She then brusquely told him to get out. Kicking his bottom, she declared “Do as you like!” while suggesting that he should do as she liked. 4 Schartauism is an austere branch of Lutheranism. Andréason was reminded of Henrik, the young priest representing B’s father, in the TV-series The Best Intentions (1991). An even closer parallel is the young theologian Henrik in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), torn between strict morals and love for his father’s wife. Ring in Svenska Dagbladet found Alceste dressed like Gösta Berling, the priest in Selma Lagerlöf’s novel Gösta Berling’s Saga (1890). 5 In the prompt script B speaks of “the red love book.”

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Élianthe and Philinte entered and were seen kissing, an early preparation for their marriage-in-store at the end. After them a very tall Clitandre entered from left, a very short Acaste from right. Comical contrast by symmetry. Joyful at their arrival, Célimène jumped up and down on her bed like a little girl who has suddenly been treated to surprise presents. The two courtiers sat down on either side of Célimène, now lying in bed. Their rivalry had become more intimate. The audience experienced them, Zern in Dagens Nyheter observed, via the jealous Alceste in the foreground – a subjective ‘shot.’ Having insulted the powerful Oronte about his sonnet, Alceste was called to stand trial by a burlesque Orderly. Handed a paper containing the poem, Alceste stated that Oronte’s sonnet might be useful for his “personal hygiene,” dried his behind with it and threw it away. The scene ended with a boisterous crowd jumping onto the bed – for group sex? Back in the salon, now with a high black-framed mirror left and another one and two black chairs right, Dorine was chased by Acaste who was without wig and coat, a piece of shirt visible outside his fly. Gradually he got himself dressed, then approached Dorine with his sword pointed to her. Seconds later she was caressing the front of his trousers. While this licentiousness occurred left, Clitandre on the right was similarly occupied with Basque. Both servants were paid for their services. An emblematic picture was in this way provided of the sex trade between masters and servants, higher and lower classes. The scene ended with Clitandre’s suggestion that he and Acaste should agree that if one of them could prove that he had gained Célimène’s favour, the other should abstain from all demands on her. This proposition was accompanied by the tall Clitandre bending down to the short Acaste. The gestural indication of equality was comically contradicted by the corporal inequality of the two. Under the pretext that she wished to give a piece of advice to her friend Célimène, Arsinoé had suddenly come to visit. Before she entered, Célimène gave Acaste and Clitandre an annihilating description of her, calling her prudish, “jealous, a female spider that had lost its males.” Her sarcasm changed to anger when she mentioned how Arsinoé “last year” – B changed this to “yesterday” – had tried to blacken Célimène’s reputation. This was uttered frontally to the audience downstage. When Arsinoé arrived upstage, dressed in what had just been called “the black veils of morality,”6 a cross hanging around her neck, Célimène quickly turned around, physically and 6 Arsinoé’s dress had dark-red ‘leaks’ in its blackness; even outwardly the contrast between confinement/convention and the sensuality underneath it was expressed (Ekmanner, 1996: 31).

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mentally, and warmly welcomed her. The distance in time from backbiting malice about someone absent to enthusiasm when this someone had appeared was minimal, thereby comically highlighting Célimène’s hypocrisy. Both women curtsied deeply to one another and artificially mimed kisses in the air. The power struggle began immediately. Célimène asked Arsinoé to sit down but Arsinoé preferred to remain standing. In artificial falsetto, reminiscent of mewing, she reported how she had tried to defend Célimène at a party when – and this was her true aggressive message – everyone had attacked her licentiousness. During this tirade Célimène protectively opened her fan, then closed it and turned it, like a weapon, against Arsinoé. She then half turned her back to Arsinoé and watched herself in the high mirror left. Soon the roles were switched. It was now Célimène’s turn to tell Arsinoé about her dubious reputation, this too under the pretext of giving wellmeaning advice to a good friend. Arsinoé now protected herself against Célimène’s hypocritical maliciousness by looking at herself in a handmirror. When biblically remarking that only he who is himself without sin has the right to blame others – a criticism that applied as much to the play’s other moralist: Alceste – Célimène parodied Arsinoé’s mewing. A culmen was reached when the two women stood with raised right arms, ready to beat each other, a bodily illustration of the mental fight that was going on between the older and the younger woman, ending with Célimène’s crushing and, in Swedish, very rhythmic hammer blows: “det fínns ju dóm som víll men ínte kán” (there are of course those who want but are not able), a reference to Arsinoé’s age-determined ‘frigidity.’7 Left alone with Alceste, Arsinoé revealed that she had a letter at home which proved Célimène’s infidelity to him. Both verbally and by her body language Arsinoé indicated that by means of this revelation she hoped to steal Alceste from Célimène. In Act IV the carpet in the salon had changed from hopeful green to passionate red. Élianthe and Philinte entered and sat down on the two black chairs left. Philinte criticised Alceste’s rigid mentality, Élianthe defended it. She took up a bundle of yarn and Philinthe, spreading his arms, willingly helped her winding it into a ball. When contradicted by his beloved, Philante desperately threw up his hands so that the yarn got messed up, an 7 Arsinoé’s and Célimène’s hateful attacks on each other at the pretence of giving each other friendly advice have a counterpart in Charlotte’s and Anne’s revelations about their husbands’ infidelity in Smiles of a Summer Night.

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indication of his emotional dilemma. The scene ended with his kneeling before Élianthe and her kissing him on the cheek. Witnessing this, Alceste entered with Célimène’s letter in his hand. Revealing its content he found a tender consoler in Élianthe whose sympathetic tears revealed that she was in love with him rather than with Philinte. When Célimène entered with a bouquet of yellow roses – yellow being traditionally associated with jealousy – Alceste asked her to explain the aggravating letter. Accusing her of faithlessness, he received the crushing reply: “But suppose the letter was written to a lady?” At this point both Alceste and the audience could feel uncertain, Alceste because this would be annihilating for his own premature conclusion regarding the letter’s addressee, the audience because in a play where various kinds of sexual behaviour had been demonstrated, lesbianism might not be excluded. Could it be that Célimène’s keeping all her suitors at a distance was based on indifference to the opposite sex? Not surprisingly, Alceste chose to regard Célimène’s indication of addressee as a lie. And tired of Alceste’s complaint about her ‘polygamy,’ Célimène came up with quite another explanation: Oronte was the addressee. Not knowing whether she was again lying or telling the truth, Alceste saw no other possibility than to accept her explanation. He admitted that his love for her was stronger than his love for the truth and even expressed the hope that Célimène’s life would turn insufferable so that he could sacrifice himself for her. Dryly remarking that this was a peculiar way of wishing someone well, Célimène threw the yellow roses at him. The dénouement occurs, traditionally, close to the end of the play. The nature of it is surprising in a play subtitled comedy. With B, early in the scene all the main characters were lined up on the forestage, first three and three opposite each other, Alceste separated from them, then in a row facing the audience, then in profile all of them bowing or curtseying to each other except Alceste who abstained from this politeness and kept looking away from the rest. What followed were recitals of selected bits from Célimène’s letters to the men present, revealing that she had been slandering to her addressees about their rivals and in this way kept them all hoping for a favourable position vis-à-vis herself. Disappointed, the suitors now verbally took their revenge by rejecting Célimène, after which they one after the other left the salon. Except for Philinte and Élianthe, who were not involved in the débâcle, only Alceste remained. He condescendingly declared that he forgave Célimène, now remorsefully crying, for her hypocritical behaviour and suggested that she spend the rest of her life with him in solitude so that they could forget the

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injustices of the world. When Célimène in response declared that she was willing to marry Alceste but not to leave her present urban environment, he was outraged and, like the others, rejected her.8 Having earlier attracted all the men around her, Célimène had become an outcast, repudiated by them all. And having finished his relationship with Célimène, Alceste was just as lonely as she was. The happy end prescribed for comedy was limited to the secondary figures Philinte and Élianthe with their forthcoming marriage. But, as Nelson (1964: 131) suggests, it is “a watered-down euphoria which this marriage creates” when Élianthe “takes Philinte as a sort of consolation prize.” In B’s version their happiness was further questioned by Philinte’s remarkable reaction to Élianthe’s declaration that she was willing to marry him. Rather than embrace and kiss her at this moment, Philinte embraced and cheek-kissed Alceste, making the audience wonder if Philinte’s love for Élianthe was not more pretended than real and if he was not, as Alceste had earlier indicated, a homosexual in disguise – in that case an up-to-date variation on the theme of hypocrisy. The play ended with Philinte’s suggestion to Élianthe that they try to persuade Alceste to change his misanthropic plan. This could be seen as providing the audience with a hope for a marriage also for Alceste and Célimène or, as B saw it in 1973, that the whole game will begin again (Wiingaard, 1976: 95). Gossman (1963: 78) claims that it is because Célimène is the woman most sought after that Alceste falls in love with her. “It is the world that he seeks to reach and possess through her.” When stating that no one has ever loved like him, Alceste, he suggests, is not only exaggerating, he is deluding himself. For his love is merely a pretended means to an end. This was not B’s interpretation. In his second production he saw Alceste and Célimène essentially as children, a characteristic they shared with many of his central characters. Alceste was “a neurotic child who loves both himself and Célimène” (Wiingaard, 1976: 95). The same view seemed to be behind the third production. Larsén in Sydsvenska Dagbladet found that B’s Alceste was “above all young” and showed “abrupt changes between upright love of truth and care for his helpless, tender love.” And Zern in Dagens Nyheter suspected that his demand for sincerity disguised “a childish impulse always to be in the centre.” Assuming that Alceste’s love for Célimène was genuine – and there were some signs of this in the performance – he was not unlike another young man, close to B’s heart: the Student in The Ghost Sonata, who in the course of this particular play becomes disillusioned 8 Alceste hates mankind for its corruption. But at this moment “he is most perverse when he ignores the possibility of rescuing one sinner from her fallen state” (Gross, 1982: 122).

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about mankind but, loving the Young Lady, makes her an exception to the rule – until he realises that as the victim of original sin, she has the same failings as everyone else. The performance of The Misanthrope was on the whole well received by the critics and had quite a long run. A planned presentation in New York was called off because B found that the production had deteriorated, that some actors, notably the actor playing Alceste, had taken liberties with their parts. As a result the production no longer held up to the reputation of representing “one of the best theatres in Europe” (Steene, 2005: 739). B was criticised for not having attended performances after the opening; had he done so, he could have prevented any deterioration and secured the New York presentation.

12. Euripides, The Bacchae Although B always kept away from classical Greek drama, there is one exception: Euripides’ The Bacchae. His interest in this play, of all the ancient plays the one closest to the roots of drama, can be traced back to the 1950s. Two planned productions of it, one in 1954, the other in 1987, were cancelled. But in 1991 B finally staged it as music drama at the Royal Opera in Stockholm, with a score by Swedish composer Daniel Börtz. Two years later a TV version of this production was broadcast in Sweden.1 And in 1996 B’s stage version of The Bacchae opened at Dramaten. Ever since The Silence, originally called “God’s Silence,” B claimed that he had lost his earlier belief in God. Whatever mercy may be found in this life is not divine but human. The only love that exists is the love we offer to and receive from one another. His handling of The Bacchae expressed this conviction. The enduring discussion whether Euripides sides with Pentheus or Dionysus2 B solved by siding with neither of them. In the struggle between them mankind, represented primarily by Pentheus’ mother Agave, is sacrificed. In her shape, humanity became the heroic victim in all three productions. The Bacchae is based on the mythological story of King Pentheus of Thebes who is punished by the god Dionysus for refusing to worship him. “In this play,” B says in the opera program, Euripides “makes a clean sweep with the gods of power and the power of gods. He contrasts the holiness and exposure of man with the atrocity and bloodthirstiness of the Superiors.” This (contestable) interpretation of The Bacchae was fundamental to B’s three productions of it. “What we are going to witness,” B writes in the opera program (Euripides, 1991: 5f.), “is the frightening final phase of a divine revenge planned for a considerable time.” And he continues: In this performance the Bacchae are a collective consisting of highly individualized characters. […] They have all replaced their civil names with letters […] to indicate that these missionaries or anarchists or terrorists left their status as individuals and members of a family when they entered the anonymous community of the Bacchus crowd.

1 An analysis of this is found in Törnqvist, 2003: 93-99. 2 The two characters have been valued very differently by commentators on the play. See Harsh, 1965: 237f.

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In late Greek art, Dionysus is represented as beardless with long curly hair looking more like a woman than a man; the theatre program for the stage performance opens with a picture of this young god. In his productions of The Bacchae, B, in agreement with this, had the traditionally male part acted by a woman.3 The reason for this was undoubtedly that both the dualism of Dionysus, who is called “immensely terrifying and immensely mild,” and his protean nature could be physically indicated in androgynous terms. In the play Dionysus’ initial mildness turns into terrifying wrath when he eventually takes revenge on those who deny his divinity. Dionysus’ androgynous nature also relates to today’s discussion of gender, both on the human and on the divine level. On the human level we find a gender opposition between the male Pentheus who denies Dionysus’ divinity and the female Bacchae who worship him as a god. 4 The polarity recalls the one between the Roman state religion and the suppressed early Christians who were often women. In psychological terms we might speak of an opposition between ‘male’ rationality and ‘female’ emotion, between the conscious and the unconscious. Having narrowed the performance from the huge opera stage to the small TV screen, B presented his third version in the small Paint Room with only nine rows for the spectators; the spectators were in other words very close to the actors. The simple setting consisted of a black backdrop and black side walls. “White lines on the floor created a symmetrical pattern: a large circle centre stage surrounded by a rectangle, and straight lines that formed a cross, dividing both circle and rectangle” (Holder, 2005: 73). In the middle of this circle a black box represented the altar of Semele, Dionysus‘ deceased mother. A circular light confirmed the holiness of the altar and the circular domain around it. More than thirty music fragments by Daniel Börtz, who had earlier composed the music for B’s opera versions, were played by a flutist and two percussionists. In the two opera versions the twelve chorus members were orientally and varyingly dressed to indicate their different national origins. They were individually named by Greek letters (Alpha, Beta, etc.) which gave them 3 In The Ritual (1969), the woman in the performing trio is named Thea. Thea is the female form of the Greek word for god as well as the first part of the word theatre suggesting a link between the divine and this art form. In the stage version of The Bacchae the part of Dionysus was actually planned for a male actor, Torsten Flinck. But when he fell ill, Elin Klinga received the part (Sjögren, 2002: 358). 4 It is the old people and the women who turn to Dionysus, Ring noted in in his review of the stage version in Svenska Dagbladet, groups which “lack status and the right to vote. The religion is initially presented mostly as a democratic project.”

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a certain anonymity. The reason for this differentiation was presumably the same as when B in the opening of his TV version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute showed a multitude of individual faces listening to the overture of the opera. In either case it showed that the collective represented humanity. In the stage version the number of chorus members was reduced to seven, all of them dressed in black, presumably indicating their representation of ‘mourning,’ suffering mankind. Slight differences in cut indicated individual variation. As in the opera versions they were named after the Greek alphabet and had individual lines. Next to the chorus there was, as in the opera versions, a mysterious figure added by B: Thalatta. Named after the Greek word for sea, she was a mute, horned figure, a stand-in for the god5 who in her ritual dances expressed “the emotions of the women around Dionysos” (Iversen, 1998: 74). The enigmatic Thalatta in the stage version, Zern in Dagens Nyheter found, was “a character radiating pain and suffering, small, thin and bony, with the mask of her face perforated by the black hole of the mouth and with blood-stained hands at the end of the pale arms.”6 In the prompt script B notes that “everybody touches Thalatta”; this, he adds, is “a ritual of consolation” for the Bacchae. Shortly after their first appearance, the chorus has the following lines in the translation used by B: Come Bacchae, come Bacchae! The god of thunder, born of a god, Dionysus – come with him from Phrygia’s mountains to the broad streets of Greece, bring here our God of Thunder, yes, bring here him who was born by his mother too early and driven out of her womb with terrible pains of childbirth hit by a flash of lightning winged sent by Zeus: 5 The horns linked her to Dionysus, who was born, the chorus tells us, as “a god with bull’s horns.” You could also think of goat’s horns; the goat was a holy animal for Dionysus; the word tragedy means ‘goat song.’ 6 With her white, masklike face this Thalatta pointed back to the figure of Death in The Seventh Seal (1957) and forward to the androgynous figure of Death in In the Presence of a Clown (1997).

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her life was taken by the lightning. And in the space where he was born his father, the son of Chronos, hid him safely in his thigh with golden clasps so that Hera did not see it When fate had so decided he gave birth to a god with bull’s horns and crowned it with snakes which he had entwined. Since that day Maenads wear wild snakes twined in their hair. […] Soon the whole country will dance and then the God of Thunder will lead the way to the mountain where the women live, the crowd of women who broke up, fled from shuttle and web, stung by Dionysus.

In the performance this became: chorus line up frontally downstage, tambourines in their hands, three on each side of alfa, the leader of the chorus. They all sing. Come Bacchae! Two beats on tambourines. Come Bacchae! The god of thunder, born of a god, Dionysus. alfa speaks. Come with him from Phrygia’s mountains to the broad streets of Greece. all speak. Bring here our God of Thunder. lambda, moving to center, speaks. Like the following speakers she is accompanied by rhythmic tambourine beats. Yes, bring here him who was born by his mother too early and driven out of her womb with terrible pains of childbirth, xi, moving to center, speaks. hit by a flash of lightning winged sent by Zeus: her life taken by the lightning. sigma, moving to center, speaks. And in the space where he was born his father, the son of Chronos,

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hid him safely in his thigh with golden clasps so that Hera did not see it. zeta, moving to center, speaks. When fate had so decided he gave birth to a god with bull’s horns and crowned it with snakes which he had entwined. Since that day Maenads wear wild snakes twined in their hair. […] xi speaks. Soon the whole country will dance and then the God of Thunder will lead the way to the mountain, all speak. the mountain xi speaks. where the women live, the crowd of women who broke up, fled from shuttle and web, stung by Dionysus. Flute music. dionysus slowly rises from Semele’s altar, as if born from it.7 He has long blond hair and wears a long white robe. One after the other members of the chorus slowly turn around and face him. They form a ring and dance around him accompanied by the flute.

Taken prisoner Dionysus, disguised as the leader of the Bacchae, appeared before Pentheus – not unlike Jesus before Pilate – with a rope around his middle. The first confrontation between the two enemies was surprising: pentheus with sleek dark hair tied in a knot at the back, dressed in a brown leather chiton, sitting in his armchair-cum-throne. Yes, stranger, you do not look bad. Up to dionysus. That Points to his hair. appeals to the women for whom you have come here. Look at the curls coiling across the cheek! Kneels next to him. No wrestler has such hair. It smells of love. Also, your skin is white. Of course, if you wish to snare Aphrodite with your beauty, you must take care that it doesn’ t get burnt in the sun.

7 Cf. the remark in the prompt script about Dionysus’ first appearance: “Dionysus […] is born out of the black backdrop onto the altar.”

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This first meeting between the two was characterised not, as one would have expected, by aggression on Pentheus’ part but by “love at first sight” and “violent attraction.” (prompt script). What was here expressed through costume – the knee-short chiton was not unlike a modern short skirt – and body language was how Pentheus’ conscious attitude was in conflict with his subconscious emotions – note the ‘suppression’ of his hair. The discrepancy between his words and his body language slowly increased, indicating how his power was gradually undermined: pentheus behind dionysus. Then we’ll keep his pretty body fettered. dionysus. And the god will liberate me whenever I wish it. pentheus. Of course, whenever you shout among the Bacchae! Soft music. dionysus. He is here now, he sees whatever happens to me. pentheus. Where? I cannot see a god here. dionysus. He is where I am. Godless you cannot see him. Music stops. pentheus. Seize him. guard and two soldiers in. He mocks both me and Thebes. dionysus. No, don’t tie me! You’re crazy if you do! pentheus squatting by his armchair. I have more power than you. – Tie him, I say. guard and soldiers up to dionysus. dionysus. What do you say? What do you do? Do you know who you are? pentheus still squatting by chair. Pentheus, born by Agave, begot by Echion. dionysus up to pentheus, leans toward him. That name condemns you to an awful fate. pentheus. Away to the stable! Backs down to the floor. Fetter him by a stall,8 Leaning above dionysus in coitus position. then he can glare in the darkness as he likes.

What was here indicated was a wish on Pentheus’ part to visit “the stranger” – not realising that he was Dionysus – “in the darkness,” unseen by others. His attempt later to spy on the sexual debauchery of the Bacchae here seemed anticipated. Behind what has been termed Dionysus’ – the 8 The translation here has höhäck (hay-rack) which B changed to spilta (stall), no doubt to suggest a connection with infant Jesus in the crib.

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wine god’s – intoxication or hypnotisation of Pentheus was Pentheus’ subconscious wish to recognise his own suppressed nature. In Dionysus and Pentheus, B illustrated the symbiotic split inside each human being between ratio and instinct. Assisted by his theatrical resources, B could suggestively dramatise what is latent in the text. When Pentheus shows a desire to see the Bacchae performing their rites, Dionysus persuades him to dress up as a woman to avoid detection by the blood-thirsty Maenads. Pentheus obeys. B had him appear in a white robe, similar to Dionysus’ own. Once in Kithairon Dionysus suggests that Pentheus takes up a position high in a tree to get a good overview. What the god does not tell him is that he will be an easy target for the Maenads. Led by Agave who, drunk from wine in Dionysian rage, mistakes her son for a wild lion, the Maenads tear him to pieces. The dismemberment (sparagmos) of Pentheus, indicated by the chorus, was by B voiced in complete darkness. Their burning oil lamps gave the impression that the cruel deed occurred under eternal stars, as if fated. Returning to Thebes, Agave, still under the illusion, proudly carries Pentheus’ head covered in a cloth in her arms. Her father Cadmus admonishes her to look carefully at what is inside it. In the translation we get: agave. I see – I unfortunate – an immeasurable pain. cadmus. Do you really think it is a lion’s head? agave. No, it is Pentheus! It is his head I am holding! cadmus. Whom we mourned long before you recognized it. agave. Who killed him? How did this come into my hand? cadmus. O bitter truth, too slowly do you come to light. agave. Tell me! My heart can’t stand waiting any more!

B shortened this to – agave. I see – an immeasurable pain. cadmus. Do you really think it is a lion’s head? agave. No, it is Pentheus! It is his head I am holding! Who killed him? How did this come into my hand? Tell me! My heart can’t stand waiting any more!

– thereby focussing more strongly on Agave’s reaction, the essence of the sequence.

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The ending was performed as follows:9 agave. Father, do you see that I have changed? Up to cadmus. They embrace. Strong clap of thunder, strong white light from behind the audience lighting up the stage. dionysus in his long white robe, a white half-mask over his face, black lips, appears from behind audience. His shadow is cast on the stage. Look here! Look here! I am your great god Dionysus, the son who was born here in Thebes by Zeus!

Cadmus, kneeling, prayed for forgiveness, but Dionysus refused with a curt “Too late!” and justified his inflexibility by adding: “Your fate was long ago determined by Zeus.” Cadmus is sentenced to be turned into a dragon, Agave and her sisters are condemned to exile. agave. To whom can I go? I have no home any more. cadmus. I don’t know. Your father is helpless. agave up to cadmus, embraces his head. Father, I cry for you. cadmus. And I for you, my child, I cry for you, for your sisters and for you. agave moves away right. With her right hand to her womb she utters a furious, wordless primal scream. Then screams. What an awful punishment did Dionysus, the ruler, call down on you and your house. dionysus appears in an opening in the black backdrop, now in a tight body-shaped, ‘male’ white dress, strongly lit from behind. His appearance is accompanied by an ear-splitting, ringing sound. Screams. What an awful offence did I suffer When the Thebans refused to worship my name. Up to agave, now lying on the floor. He puts his foot on her, then exits right. 9 Cf. the slightly different description in the prompt script: “The catastrophe (The Dionysian light). Dionysus stealing in, gliding. All try individually to protect themselves, pressing against the floor. Cadmus covers his eyes. Agave is the only one who remains standing. Dionysus attacks her soundlessly from behind, knocks her down and places himself on top of her.” Here the baseness of the god and the heroism of (wo)man clearly comes to the fore.

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Normal light. cadmus and agave are lying on the floor. They hold hands. cadmus. Poor daughter, farewell. Lets her hand loose. You have a long way to the bliss I wished for you. Exits front. chorus exit front. agave left alone on stage. Where are my sisters? O bring me to them, my travel companions to foreign lands! […] chorus sit frontally on forestage, sing accompanied by flute and drums. at one point recalling thunder followed by a siren In many shapes a god takes form and often the gods mock our hope, for nothing turns out as we had expected. A god treads his way unexpected. They enter the stage one after the other and lay down their thyrsus staffs and tambourines by Semele’s altar. Music culminates with ‘thunder’ followed by ‘siren.’ all except alfa exit in different directions. Drum rolls. alfa speaks. This is what our play was to show.

Already in 1960, B declared that “art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship” (B, 1960: xxii). To make the god-man relationship in The Bacchae urgent to a modern audience, the faith in Dionysus somehow needed to be related to today’s religious climate. In his opera versions of the play, B stressed the parallels between Dionysus and Christ in various ways (Törnqvist, 2003: 94f.). In the stage version this was less pronounced but certainly not absent. I have already pointed to the similarity between Dionysus-Pentheus and Jesus-Pilate and the closeness between Pentheus in the stall and Jesus in the crib. It is significant in this context that the first Messenger in the text, reporting about the orgies of the Bacchae, was called the Shepherd in the performance. The shepherds, we recall, were the first to discover and pay homage to infant Jesus. Fundamental in the play is the idea that Dionysus, born as a god, appears in human shape; in this he is Christ-like. Like Christ, he performs many miracles. Like Christianity, Dionysian faith was when it emerged a new religion, first embraced by common people. When Tiresias predicts that the new god whom Pentheus ridicules will eventually gain supremacy in Greece, he is foreshadowing the explosive growth of Christianity. The similarity goes even deeper. “In the Catholic communion,” B has said, “there’s something called the elevation. At a particular moment the priest raises the chalice.

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[…] The Catholic ritual of the elevation is a relic from the cult of Dionysus” (B, 1993: 240f.)10 There is in fact a strong relationship between the Bacchae’s consumption of the god’s flesh and the consumption in the communion of bread and wine, figuratively Christ’s flesh and blood. Disguised from the audience was another aspect of the play which was of great importance to B as a director. A look at his TV plays The Ritual and After the Rehearsal (1984),11 both highly inspired by The Bacchae, will make this clear. When the Judge in The Ritual rapes Thea, his act is tantamount to the rational critic’s and censor’s love-hate relationship with the irrational. Like Pentheus, the Judge has divided loyalties that force him on the one hand to censor the performance of the three actors and on the other to be tempted by it. “I wanted to see your number at close quarters,” he tells the actors. “Perhaps I had an obscure desire to take part.” And so a private performance is arranged for him. Although Pentheus wants to ban Dionysus and his followers, he nevertheless, masked as a woman, eavesdrops on the orgies of the Bacchae. As a public figure, he is a moral censor; as a private person he is a voyeur, thus incarnating both the superego and the id. In a more disguised manner, Henrik Vogler in After the Rehearsal on the one hand and Rakel and Anna on the other represent the fundamental opposition between Pentheus and Dionysus, the ego and the id. Rakel’s comment that as an actress, she was “the foremost one,” echoes verbatim Agave’s pride of being the foremost maenad. In After the Rehearsal, Pentheus is identified, not with the critic-spectator as in The Ritual, but with the director-spectator. Whereas “the actor has to expose himself under the lights,” Vogler says, “the director” – like another Pentheus – “remains in the darkness of the auditorium” (B, 2001: 18). As a director, Vogler “hates tumult, aggressions, outbursts.” He wants quiet, order, and kindness. […] I am not spontaneous, impulsive, part of the action. It only looks that way. If for one second I were to tear off my mask and say what I felt or thought, you [actors] would all turn on me in a rage, tear me apart and throw me out the window. (B, 2001: 35f.)

This is, of course, what happens to Pentheus, whose head is severed from his body by his own mother, turning it into a torso. Rakel’s idea of theatre is the very opposite of Vogler’s: 10 The word “mass” in the translation has here been replaced by the more correct ‘communion.’ 11 An analysis of the latter is found in Törnqvist, 2001a: 25-42.

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Theater is shit and squalor and horniness and tumult, confusion and the blackest kind of mischief. I don’t believe your purity theory at all. It is false and highly suspect. (B, 2001: 36)

It is evident that B has used the conflict between Pentheus and the Bacchae to illustrate the relationship between the lonely director and the cast. This dialectical relationship, which has a certain affinity to that between Apollo and Dionysus in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, B seems to say, is needed to make drama come to life. Rehearsing a play is a kind of intercourse between director and actors, a confluence of opposites hopefully resulting in a well-shaped child on opening night. Anxious, as usual, to involve the audience in the action, B implied a theatrum mundi by having the actors make some of their entrances from behind the spectators. The obliteration of the dividing line between stage and auditorium reached a climax when Dionysus toward the end revealed himself as a god. He then suddenly stood “in the midst of the audience with the sound of thunder and a flash of dazzling lightning dressed in a shining white garment, with brilliant, white hair, white covered arms and hands, on his face a white mask” (Iversen, 1998: 80). At the end the chorus placed their thyrsus staffs on Semele’s altar much as the characters in B’s production of A Dream Play sacrificed their attributes by placing them on the writer’s desk. In the closing lines, describing how man’s hope is constantly thwarted by the gods and how “nothing turns out the way we had expected it,” the theme of this Strindberg drama seemed verbalised. In his first diary note for Mourning Becomes Electra, the trilogy based on Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Eugene O’Neill (in New York Herald Tribune June 19, 1932) asks himself: “Is it possible to get modern psychological approximation of Greek sense of fate into such a play, which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by?” If we substitute ‘production’ for O’Neill’s “play,” the description fits B’s stage production of The Bacchae about which Zern in Dagens Nyheter said: “Nothing that I have seen of this almost seventy-eight-year old director has gripped me so to the bone. He presents The Bacchae with a self-evident authority that makes the cruel play speak directly to our time.” The performance was generally lauded and most critics praised its great emotional impact. To B himself it was “by far the best” of his three productions of the play (Sjögren, 2002: 356).

13. August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata In a Prologue written for the opening of his own Intimate Theatre in Stockholm in 1907, Strindberg speaks of the journey that mankind must undertake “from the Isle of the Living to the Isle of the Dead.” He was alluding to Arnold Böcklin’s well-known paintings, copies of which at his request had been placed at either side of the stage in this theatre (Falck, 1935: 53). In his chamber play The Ghost Sonata (1907), 1 we witness a similar journey. The house we see on the stage represents the House of Life which at the end vanishes and is replaced by the Isle of the Dead. Along with the Student, we gradually discover that the house which looks attractive on the outside (Act I), inside is in poor shape (Act II). Life may not be what we had expected but the Student is convinced that amor vincit omnia (Act III). Yet even this proves to be an illusion. Like everyone else, the beloved Young Lady is “sick at the source of life,” tainted by Original Sin. The attractive house proves to be a mirage. Will the source be found in the after-life? The play title alludes to the fact that if life on earth is a shadow life and that we are all ‘ghosts’ – whereas those who appear as ghosts in the play, although dead, are the truly ‘living.’ In quite another sense, the title alludes to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor (Op. 31, No. 2), usually called Der Sturm (The Tempest). In a letter to his German translator, Emil Schering, Strindberg refers to it as the Gespenster (Ghost) sonata. He had used it in an earlier play, Crimes and Crimes, to indicate the pangs of conscience afflicting the protagonist. The subtitle of The Ghost Sonata, “Chamber Play Opus III,” suggests that the author had a ‘musical’ structure in mind, in accordance with his own definition of the term ‘chamber play’: “the concept of chamber music transferred to drama. The intimate action, the highly significant motif, the sophisticated treatment” (Strindberg, 1959: 19). B’s interest in the play can be traced back to 1930. “When I was twelve,” he writes, “I read The Ghost Sonata for the first time. I had bought it in a second-hand bookshop and planned to stage it in my puppet theatre.” In 1941 he put on his first production of the play with a group of amateurs in Stockholm who performed for children in a small theatre. But “one day we began to play to grown-ups, beginning with The Ghost Sonata, which had not been produced [in Sweden] since the days of the Old Intimate Theatre.” The deficiencies of this production were clear to him a year later when he 1 The first edition carries this date but the play was not available in the bookshops until Jan. 23, 1908. For examinations of B’s productions of this play, see Törnqvist, 1973 and 2000.

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witnessed Olof Molander‘s pioneering production at Dramaten. “What I experienced that night in the theatre,” he declared later, “seemed to me absolute and unattainable – and it seems so still” (B, 1953: 7). In his second production of the play, at the huge stage of the City Theatre in Malmö in 1954, he “consciously built on Molander’s production” (B in Timm, 1994: 127). The proscenium opening was narrowed and the stage extended into the auditorium. When the grey curtain was raised the audience sat in pitch-darkness and watched white clouds drift by on a transparent scrim which remained during the whole evening, serving as a barely visible gauze between stage and auditorium (Wahlund in Svenska Dagbladet). From the beginning B in this way put the audience in what Strindberg would have called “hypnosis in a state of awakeness,” facilitating their identification with the Student, the dreamer of the play. During the rehearsals B told his friend, the filmmaker and critic Vilgot Sjöman (1963: 11), that as much as he loved the first two acts of the play he detested the last one. “But it is my damned duty as a director to shape it with exactly the same objectivity.” B’s third Ghost Sonata was staged at Dramaten in 1973. The original plan was that the play should be produced in the Paint Room of the theatre. Here B would have had an auditorium approximating the size of Strindberg’s own Intimate Theatre. But this plan had to be abandoned for security reasons. Instead the play was staged on the Big Stage. In Act I a beautiful white art nouveau apartment building – in agreement with Strindberg’s prescription, in 1907, for a “modern façade” – was projected on two high screens. However, when the Old Man and the Student watched the house, they did not look at the projected house upstage. They looked in the opposite direction, into the auditorium. In this way the modern house was, as it were, placed not only on the stage but also in the auditorium. Since the house represents the House of Life and its inhabitants stand for humanity, this arrangement which linked the audience with the characters on the stage was highly meaningful. Appearing on either side of the proscenium frame, the inhabitants of the house came to function as mediators between the audience inside the House of Life and the characters out in the street. Fundamental behind the production was the idea that “the Young Lady is slowly turning into another Mummy.”2 To convey this idea the director had the same actress play the roles of the Young Lady and the Mummy, mother and daughter. Similarly, there was an outward resemblance between the Old Man and the Student. The young people in this way seemed to incarnate an 2

B in an interview with Egil Törnqvist Jan. 5, 1973.

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earlier stage in the old people’s lives and, conversely, they seemed destined eventually to turn into guilt-laden old people, an idea Strindberg hints at, not least through his age-oriented speaker labels. Taken together, the male and the female couples thus presented a picture of the inevitable fate inherent in the process of ageing. In his fourth staging of The Ghost Sonata these correspondences were not stressed. The two women were played by different actresses and the two men did not look particularly alike – although the actors playing these parts were actually father and son. To underline that the whole play is a dream, or a nightmare, B reintroduced the generic subtitle of the original production, “fantasy piece.” He also chose to have the play performed, not on a big stage as in 1954 and 1973, but on the small one of the Paint Room surrounded by black velvet curtains, with even fewer properties than before. A number of mostly limited changes were made in the play text. The verbal and visual references to Buddha were eliminated, since a modern Swedish audience would have no affinity with Buddhism. So were the references to the harp which miraculously begins to play by itself when the Young Lady dies. Passages that would be hard to grasp by an audience were omitted. This goes, for example, for the Old Man’s use of the word “sportsman,”3 and for the odd way in which an acquaintance of his used to pronounce the word window. 4 The text mentions sums which around 1907 were considerable. Thus the Old Man claims that the Student’s father had robbed him of 17,000 crowns, and the Student a little later dreams of having a private interest of 20.000 crowns a year. To equate Strindberg’s intended audience with his own, B replaced the former amount with “a considerable sum” and the latter with “a comfortable fortune.” Latin expressions like Cor in aethere (heart in the ether/sky) and Sursum Corda (uplift your heart), unintelligible to most spectators, were cut. Remarkable, not least in view of the director’s re-introduction of the subtitle “fantasy piece,” was the shortening of the following lines by the Student in Act III: Where is beauty? In nature and in my mind when it’s in its Sunday best. Where are faith and honor? In fairy tales and children’s plays. Where does anything fulfil its promise? … In my imagination! 3 During rehearsals of his third production of the play, B declared that he had never understood the significance of the “sportsman” reference (Törnqvist, 1973: 100); for an interpretation, see Törnqvist, 2001b: 132f. 4 For the significance of the “window” passage, see Törnqvist, 2010: 111ff.

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This was shortened to: “Where is beauty? Where does anything fulfill its promise?” As a result the synchronisation between the Student’s implied growing up and his becoming disillusioned was weakened. While B in his earlier presentations of The Ghost Sonata had largely abstained from music, in his last version he made incidental use throughout the production, not of the Beethoven sonata or trio indicated by Strindberg, but of Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936). The percussion could be associated with the grumbling Old Man whose surname, Hummel, recalls the word for bumble-bee in Swedish (humla). The celesta – the word means ‘heavenly’ – could be linked with the Student, who can see what others cannot see, and also with the celestial Milkmaid. The Student’s report about the girl he had tried to save from the collapsing house the preceding night was accompanied by an eerie fragment from Bartók’s piece, giving a lyrical, dreamlike touch to his narration. As soon as he discovered that the attempt had failed and that his arms were empty, the music stopped. What seemed to have been either a visionary fantasy or a result of the Student’s second sight found its aural equivalent in Bartók’s music. Even more than in B’s earlier productions of the play the Student was the dreamer. This was indicated not by means of a gauze curtain, as in the Malmö version, but by having him appear on the stage from the sunken walkway in the middle of the sloping auditorium. Crawling onto the stage in his dirtied clothes, he was not only escaping from the collapsed house to be confronted with one that eventually would prove to be in a bad state. He was also waking up from a nocturnal dream soon to be revivified on the stage. And, born out of the ‘womb’ of the dark auditorium, he was entering life as a little child, as an Everyman. In the first act of the play, Strindberg calls for “the ground floor and first floor façade of a modern apartment building [c. 1900].” As in 1973, a black-and-white photo of an apartment house was projected on the black velvet drapes framing the claustrophobic black box where the dream was to be enacted. Representing the House of Life, this stately ‘fortress’ behind which mankind – notably the well-to-do bourgeoisie – were hiding their frailties, was a projected black-and-white replica of the so-called Red House where Strindberg lived when he wrote The Ghost Sonata5 and which Olof Molander had earlier recreated in his productions of the play. Pulled down in 1969, this building was replaced by an apartment house where B came to 5 In the theatre program the list of characters and cast was significantly inscribed on the faint image of the Red House in the background.

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live. Whereas Molander’s spectators could still find the Red House in their city, B’s had to locate it in their memory, as one of those buildings that were pulled down to be replaced by a modern one; reality in this way strangely seemed to imitate fiction. Inscribed in the lilac stage floor in front of the house was a green rectangle. To those familiar with Stockholm this could be seen as a stylised reproduction of the square, Karlaplan, where the Red House was located. Symbolically, the combination lilac-green could be seen as an indication of how the old generation in the play co-existed with the young – as they always do in life, green representing not only youth but also hope. As in his 1973 production, B placed the House of Life both in the auditorium and on the stage, thereby creating both a teatrum mundi and a dizzy dream effect. When the Old Man described the inhabitants of the house to the Student, both of them looked into the auditorium. In Act II, the grandfather clock to the left and the marble statue to the right indicated that the spectators were inside the house entered by the Student-mediator. In Acts II and III the upstage room, framed by Wagner pulls, had the appearance of an inner stage with a theatrical quality characteristic of turn-of-the-century upper-class interiors. The street drinking-fountain to the right was this time placed below the stage floor. From it, radiating with a mysterious green light, real water was scooped up by the Milkmaid. A wholesome well – B’s film The Virgin Spring came to mind – this fountain of life was obviously meant to correspond to “the source of life” – the womb or Paradise before the Fall – mentioned in Act III. To the left of this well was another hole in the ground, a sewer into which the Caretaker’s Wife matter-of-factly emptied a bucket full of faeces. The two contrasting holes anticipated the Student’s discovery in Act III that the Young Lady is “sick at the source of life,” her representative fate after the Fall. The unmasking of the characters, especially of the Young Lady, was synchronised with the withering of the hyacinths, an idea that was in B’s mind already in 1973 but which was then abolished. While Strindberg calls for hyacinths of various colours, B limited himself to the white – pure, innocent – kind. In Act I the Young Lady was seen watering and softly talking to the hyacinths in the window of her hyacinth room. Watching her, the Old Man compared her to the blue hyacinth. The preference for this colour appeared in Act III when the Student declared that he loved above all the blue hyacinth, “the dewy-blue of fidelity.” Accordingly, B’s Young Lady appeared in an elegant, light blue silk dress, with embroideries around bosom and arms and a broad ‘chastity belt’ around the waist. In

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Act II the hyacinths had already begun to wither. In Act III beautiful giant white hyacinths were projected on the side walls corresponding to the Student’s enamoured illusions about the nature of the Young Lady as an ideal representative of (wo)mankind. Contrasting with these were the tiny, withered, real hyacinths in the little box in front of her, smelling so badly that she had to sprinkle herself with perfume around her neck and behind to quench the odour. The sickness of humanity was amply demonstrated in the characters. The Dark Lady had a red boil on her cheek which she desperately tried to hide behind her hand. The Posh Man constantly kept licking a red – syphilitic? – sore below his mouth with his tongue. The Fiancée had an ear that was bright red from the constant use of an ear trumpet and her laughter at the most inopportune moments indicated her lack of wits. The Mummy’s entangled hair bore witness of her inner confusion. The Old Man’s warped mouth and slow patter suggested that he had suffered a stroke, motivating his awareness that his days were numbered. His bleeding, bandaged hands indicated either psoriasis or stigmatisation. More closely, in the context of the play, his blood-stained hands referred to his ‘murdering’ of the Milkmaid and the Consul.6 Johansson wore a shoe that seemed considerably longer than the other one; an oily, ingratiating figure, he showed, like Hummel’s son, homosexual leanings. The Colonel’s iron corset was, as in 1973, revealed when the Old Man tore his blue, Swedish-looking uniform open. The Young Lady showed self-inflicted scratches on her arm and, as in 1973, blood around her abdomen, once her shiny, light-blue Amazon ‘armor’ was removed. Stiffly moving around as if in trance – a sleepwalker in life – she showed at an early point “only the white” of her eyes “like a blind person” (Barbara Villiger Heilig in Neue Zürcher Zeitung). Barbro Westling in Aftonbladet summarised: “They all have ugly and unhealed wounds of the life they have lived.” As the outsider-narrator of a nightmarish dream, the Student appeared throughout the performance in the same clothes: white shirt, light grey dress, light grey shoes.7 The Old Man was in Act I hiding behind dark 6 To the well informed, the rags also seemed to allude to Strindberg who suffered from psoriasis while writing the play (Steene, 2005: 751). In his prompt script B in addition provides the Old Man with “rotten teeth” and a bad smell and describes him as “physically extremely repellent.” 7 Although Strindberg does not indicate it, the Student is often on the stage provided with a white student’s cap that immediately identifies him as a Swedish student. B always abstained from the student’s cap, either because the habit of wearing one except on special occasions ceased long ago in Sweden, or because it could connote an unwanted indication of social class.

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glasses. He wore a black fur cap, a black, fur-edged coat – both status symbols – and grey fingerless woollen gloves. In his wheelchair he kept his cane and a worn bag, containing the sweets with which he tried to catch his victims. “All the others walk around in thin clothes,” Zern noted in Dagens Nyheter, but “he is sitting in his winter coat protecting himself against inner cold. Through his dark Beckett glasses he observes the world conspiringly.” To those who had read the theatre program his crutches and his coat-tails could be seen as indications that he was “a bat of the vampire genus.” In Act II the Old Man appeared in a black top hat; when removed, it showed a bald head. He now wore dark-green clothes, including a waistcoat with a black-green, frog-like pattern. The Milkmaid wore a grey dress with a grey-and-white striped apron in Act I, later a long, white shroud-like petticoat. The Young Lady wore a light grey riding habit in Act I, in Act II replaced by a light-blue dress, pearl-embroidered above, at once a star-studded sky and a shiny armour. The Mummy’s entangled grey hair around a head that twitched like that of a parrot seemed part of her grey negligee turning red below as if she was being drained of her life-blood. Her voice subtly fluctuated between anguished humility and passionate condemnation. Bengtsson, the servant, appeared like an anachronism in an 18th century red costume, with a huge black bow-tie, his patriotic medal proudly fastened to his breast. A suggestive visual correspondence occurred when the Colonel’s handling of his monocle was mimicked by the Dead Consul’s handling of his. When the Old Man was vampirically gripping the Student’s hand, the Student’s anguish was echoed in a silent cry à la Munch by the Dark Lady, who herself had been made pregnant by the Posh Man. The few comical touches centred on Johansson, the Old Man’s servant, who, combining self-importance with ingratiation, walked around with a briefcase out of which he eventually produced, not documents or even books, but a pocket-flask which he evidently regularly sipped. When he told the Student that the Old Man was reputed to have been in Hamburg, he laughed insinuatingly and waved his grey bowler hat like a cabaretier; the implication was obviously that the Old Man had been a customer of Reeperbahn, the famous red light district of that city. Entering the house in Act II to take part in the ghost supper, Strindberg’s Old Man verbally unmasks the Colonel before the guests arrive. As already noted, B had him do it also physically. In the prompt script it says that he “tears off the Colonel’s moustache and false teeth, forces him down on his knees, tears his uniform open, and holds his head against the mirror.” A characteristic know-thyself sequence by B.

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For the Mummy’s first entrance, the prompt script prescribes: “The cupboard door is slowly opened and the Mummy patters out, slightly trotting. Harmed by the light, she shrinks from it, leaps up to the Old Man, pulls at his wig, leaps back, turns around, hands under her chin.” As a result of her long “imprisonment” in the wardrobe, it further states, she “has the peculiarity that she never looks at the one she talks to except for short, intensive moments.” Guilt-laden, her glances turn inwards – as do those of her daughter. As in 1973, B indicated a tender relationship between the Mummy and the Colonel. He had the Mummy eavesdrop when the Colonel was stripped by the Old Man, thereby strengthening her motivation to pronounce judgement on the Old Man later. But unlike the situation in 1973 the Mummy and the Colonel were not united at the end. They stood in frozen positions isolated from each other and from the dead Young Lady in front of them. Whether living or dead, the director seemed to say, we are ultimately alone. The prelude to the ghost supper was this time more elaborate and the supper – during which neither tea nor biscuits were served – included one more guest: the Dark Lady. Hiding her boil with one hand, she reached out the other to be kissed by the Colonel – in vain. The Mummy similarly turned away from her. Placed at the right end of the row of chairs, half turned-away from the others, she was collectively rejected. The drowning of the Milkmaid was repeated pantomimically when she unexpectedly appeared, from the entrance below the auditorium, writhing in front of the Old Man who was standing on his wheelchair, surrounded by the Beggars, like a king surrounded by his courtiers. With his cane he tried to repress the Milkmaid, that is, the traumatic memory of his “murder” of her. She then placed herself in the painful position of the crucified Christ next to the grandfather clock in anticipation of the revengeful murder of the Old Man. Once Bengtsson had revealed the Old Man’s hidden crime, the latter tried to escape from the death penalty that had been pronounced on him but he was prevented from doing so by the guests. Having run the gauntlet along them, he finally sought support from Johansson who received him in his arms – only to carry him into the closet, where the Milkmaid was waiting to put the rope around his neck. All the Old Man’s victims in this way took their revenge. Johansson picked up the Old Man’s cane, waved it like a cabaretier to indicate that, now freed from his slavery, he had taken his master’s place. At the end of Act II Strindberg’s Student recites from “The Song of the Sun,” with its moral that “man must reap what he has sown,” in the context

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above all a comment on the Old Man’s death. The recital is accompanied by the Young Lady’s harp playing. In 1973 the Student recited the lines by heart, apparently from the red book he had in his hands. This time he was reading the lines, it says in the production script, “from the Young Lady’s book.” The red book he has earlier pressed to his heart is in other words now explicitly ascribed to her. Strindberg’s Act III opens as follows: young lady. Sing now, sing for my flowers! student. Is this your soul’s flower? young lady. The one and only. Do you love the hyacinth?

In the performance the act opened with the Student writing in his black notebook. The lines were now: young lady. Read now aloud what you have written. student. I have written about your flowers but above all about the hyacinth which I believe is your soul’s flower. young lady. Do you too love the hyacinth?

The Student’s lyrical-psychological appraisal of the hyacinth that follows and that had been spoken spontaneously in B’s earlier productions, was this time read aloud from the Student’s notebook. The highly romantic description was in other words not the result of an impulsive outburst but was, more credibly, a writer’s contemplated way of expressing himself. In Act III the Cook, a short,8 fat and dirty woman, more repulsive than terrifying, held the brown soya bottle with the Japanese “scorpion” letters in her blood-stained hand. At her second appearance, she was accompanied by Bengtsson, he too in grey proletarian clothing, brushing one of the Young Lady’s riding-boots. The two were “an aged Jean and an old Kristin” (Ring in Svenska Dagbladet) serving the Young Lady who was, as it were, a descendant of Miss Julie. The plans that were abolished in 1973 to have their “You suck the strength out of us, and we out of you” reverberate were now put into effect. The line was echoed as if by an anonymous, mumbling proletariat. The thematic focus was on lost virginity, linking the street drinkingfountain, the marble statue of a young half-naked woman (Eve after the Fall), the Milkmaid killed by the Old Man, and the Young Lady ‘killed’ by the Student. In Act II a tapestry was projected on the side walls showing a 8

Not the “big” woman the Student speaks of.

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lancer on horseback piercing a unicorn, the traditional symbol of virginity, with his lance, not only a reference to sexual penetration but also a reference to the killings just mentioned. By showing the Milkmaid as unwantedly pregnant9 like the Dark Lady and, earlier, the Mummy; by having the Old Man contaminate the marble statue when he placed a mark of blood on its stomach; and by having the Young Lady, in Act III, violently beat her stomach, B linked the key line of the play – the reference to the sickness at the source of life – to the origin of us all: the womb, as well as to Original Sin. When the Student despairingly asked “where is virginity to be found,” he made an obscene gesture toward the Young Lady’s womb, whereupon he brutally took hold of her head as he continued: “To think that the most beautiful flowers are so poisonous, are the most poisonous.” Having been unmasked by the Student, the Young Lady crawled out of her dress “like a butterfly out of the chrysalis” (Zern), revealing her petticoat, stained by blood around the womb, and her body stigmatised by red scars around the neck. The Student’s closing speech in the text was divided up between him and the Mummy. In the production script the end reads: bengtsson in with the death screen which he opens up and puts in front of the young lady. He then sits down on a chair, his head and arms hanging down. The mummy and the colonel have stood up. milkmaid becomes visible. young lady up behind the screen, groping and disfigured. Dies in cramp. student takes the dead girl in his arms. Sleep, you beautiful, unhappy, innocent creature who bear no blame for your suffering, sleep without dreams, and when you awaken again … may you be greeted by a sun that does not burn, in a house without dust, by friends without faults, by a love without flaw. Intends to leave. Finds the young lady’s book. Reads it with a new insight. student tears the book apart and throws it away. Leaves the stage but remains visible as in the opening. mummy and colonel up. They take away the screen and bend over the dead girl..

9 This directorial addition was probably inserted to indicate that Bengtsson’s obscure “she [the Milkmaid] had witnessed a crime he [the Old man] feared would be discovered” would refer to the fact that the Old Man is the cause of the girl’s pregnancy and that he lured her “out onto the ice” in Hamburg to get rid both of her and the expected child.

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mummy. Poor little child, child of this world of illusion, guilt, suffering and death; this world of endless change, disappointment and pain. May the Lord of Heaven have mercy on you on your journey …

In 1973 B had the Student sceptically recite the lines from “The Song of the Sun” at the end of the play. In the production script he is even more negative when he has the Student throw away the book from which he has earlier recited “The Song of the Sun,” the book he has earlier held to his heart. In this performance he eliminated the book altogether. Instead he brought the Milkmaid once more onto the stage and focussed on the connection between her and the Young Lady. As the Young Lady was standing in her petticoat behind the death screen with its Japanese letters meaning “life, death, eternity,”10 the Milkmaid, almost identically dressed in what looked like a shroud, rolled onto the stage through the black curtain at the back and joined the Young Lady, now lying on the floor. As the Mummy approached them for the final intercession, her use of the intimate singular pronoun (du) made it clear that the two women now represented one and the same child (of man). The text reference to “the Lord of Heaven” was changed into the more Christian-sounding “God the Father,” a dubious concession to a largely nominally Christian audience. The Young Lady was then carried out by four men wearing lilac suits and top hats, with faces hidden behind gauze. The Milkmaid, who had earlier been seen several times in the position of the crucified Christ, now appeared alone on the stage – seen by the Student standing in the auditorium as a member of the audience – performing a final, upward-striving dance. This was B’s non-verbal substitute for the Student’s prayer to Buddha in the play text that the Young Lady should re-awaken in heaven. The message seemed clear. The death of the Young Lady meant a separation of body and soul, the former left on the stage in the form of a piece of clothing doomed to annihilation, the latter, in the Student’s hope – an important qualification – blessed with survival. No Toten-Insel, no angelic harp, no “Song of the Sun” at the end as in the play text, not even a secular family reunion as in 1973. And yet consolation, be it subjective, in the final vision of the spiritualised Milkmaid, now identified with the dead Young Lady, “born” by the Student and the audience together. His hope, their hope.

10 Information from scenographer Göran Wassberg.

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B’s fourth and last production of The Ghost Sonata was not hailed as one of the director’s most memorable stagings.11 But most critics considered it a coherent, fluid, and deeply meaningful presentation. As usual the actors playing the Old Man and the Mummy, two thankful roles, were especially praised, while the actors incarnating the Student and the Young Lady, two less rewarding parts, received less attention. Several critics pointed out the puppet-like nature of the characters, leaving it open whether the Old Man, B, God, or Fate was the master puppeteer (Larsén in Sydsvenska Dagbladet). The bare stage caused Zern in Dagens Nyheter to think of an empty rehearsal room, B’s favourite ‘stage,’ whereas Sörenson in Expressen reminded the reader that this was a production by a filmmaker; to her the performance, understood as the Student’s nightmare, was “a horror film from the period of the silent film.” There were guest performances in Oslo, Copenhagen, and New York.

11 B himself regarded it as the best of his four Ghost Sonata productions. “That third movement is generally seen as a diminuendo,” he somewhat enigmatically told Sjögren (2002: 341), “and has always been done that way but to me it is a crescendo.”

14. Friedrich von Schiller, Mary Stuart It was hardly a surprise that B chose a drama about women for his nextto-last stage production, least of all since he now felt that he had found two ideal actresses for the two main roles (Steene, 2005: 756). Both as a film and as a stage director he had often concerned himself with relations, often rivalry, between women. But in this case it was about two royalties in the 16th century and that made a difference. For while rivalry between women involves universal and timeless problems, rivalry between royalties has political implications as well. Besides, the view of royalty has changed drastically since the 16th century. In that period, as in Schiller’s play reflecting it, royalties were generally considered to have their rank by divine right. This partly explains Mary’s strong attachment to religion. It explains why in her view only a person of equal status, i.e. another royalty, could judge her. And it explains why Elizabeth, who could surmise how historically irrevocable an order of death penalty would be, found it so diff icult to condemn her cousin to death. Such a death sentence would after all affect her own kind. When it was nevertheless put into effect, it was a revolutionary example of equality before the law that was followed by capital punishments of royalties during the irreligious French Revolution. Today it is difficult to sense the enormous impact a belief in royalty by divine right had, not only in the 16th century, but even to some extent in 1800 when Schiller’s Mary Stuart was first performed. This belief definitely belongs to a bygone era. When presenting the play to secularised audiences like the one in Sweden, B had to take this into account. They might admire the title character for her courage and firmness, but they would have trouble sharing her conviction of her own judicially superior position. Schiller’s drama deals with the short period between the death sentence of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, issued by the members of the English Parliament, Queen Elizabeth I’s signing of this sentence, and the execution of it. The f ive-act tragedy oscillates between Fotheringhay Castle in northern England where Mary is held prisoner (Acts I, III and V) and Westminster Palace in London, where Elizabeth and the Parliament are seated. Many characters and events agree more or less with historical circumstances, but here and there Schiller has adjusted historical reality to the demands of dramatic art. Most obvious in this respect is his inclusion of a meeting between the two queens in the climactic Act III; in reality the two never met. Another example is the inclusion in the play of the

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unhistorical, but for the plot exceedingly important, Mortimer. A third example is the involvement of the Cardinal of Lotharingia in Mary’s case; the Cardinal was by this time already dead. Central to the theme of the play is that Schiller chose to make his Mary guilty of complicity in the plot to murder Darnley [her second husband] but innocent in the Babington plot [aiming at assassinating Elizabeth and placing Mary on the English throne] – both matters of historical dispute – so that he could make her accept her death as an atonement for her earlier guilt. (Lesley Sharpe in Schiller, 2008: xx)

Historical drama is primarily national drama. Although the execution of Mary Stuart would be known to many Swedes, the circumstances leading to it would not. To help the understanding of the play articles on the historical situation around the two queens were included in the theatre program. In the play itself B eliminated many of the political references, aware that they would be a hindrance to an audience largely unfamiliar with Tudor history. A guide line justifying the large omissions in the production script was obviously to play down the political and religious conflict in favour of the personal one, to stress the controversy between two women rather than the one between two queens.1 This was a rather natural choice for a director who had always let personal conflicts prevail over social and political ones. Moreover, it made the two queens more relevant as identification objects to an audience familiar only with powerless monarchs. When Mary was executed she was 45, Elizabeth 53. Schiller’s queens, the dramatist suggested, should appear much younger on stage, Mary about 25, Elizabeth about 30. The ages of B’s actresses were much closer to those of the historical figures; his Mary was 42, his Elizabeth 45. The fact that they were of about the same age strengthened their erotic rivalry. B divided Schiller’s five acts into two parts and eleven scenes. The location shifted between Westminster Palace in London, the seat of Queen Elizabeth and the Parliament, and Fotheringhay Castle in northern England where Mary was held prisoner.

1 Cf. Schiller’s advice to Goethe, reprinted in the theatre program, that the roles of Elizabeth and Mary should be cast by women in the mistress category and not in the queen category. Goethe was head of the Weimar Court Theatre, where the play had its world premiere.

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The bare grey stage, designed by Göran Wassberg, was flanked by two high grey walls placed askew on either side of it. The vertical predominance, Ring in Svenska Dagbladet wrote, gave associations to a church. Horizontally the stage was divided into a higher background and a lower foreground, two low steps separating the two areas. This arrangement enabled smooth and swift scene shifts; the few properties needed could easily be brought in and out by the black-dressed stage hands. The arrangement also enabled tableaux vivant scenes to be visualised in the background while verbalised acting took place in the foreground. This concerned especially the two queens. When Elizabeth was acting in the foreground, Mary was usually seen as a silent witness sometimes in the background, sometimes in darkness in the foreground left. Similarly, when Mary was acting in the foreground, Elizabeth was usually seen as a silent witness in the background. This arrangement visualised a fundamental idea behind the production: that the two were constantly on each other’s mind, Elizabeth as the person ultimately responsible for Mary’s fate, and Mary as a vivid part of Elizabeth’s conscience. After the black curtain containing portraits and short descriptions of the two queens had been raised, the whole ensemble appeared on the stage, accompanied by fanfares, bowing to the audience – as they would at the end of a performance. Here it was a meta-theatrical device in anticipation of what was to come. In the middle of the ensemble the chief roles, Mary and Elizabeth, appeared side by side, both in varying shades of royal red – as if the dream of a united Britain was visualised. This was a dream shared by many. But there was no unanimity as to who of the two would be head of this united kingdom. This was symbolically indicated in B’s little prelude when Mary removed her royal red gown, revealed her black dress underneath it and moved into the darkness left, symbolising the Fotheringhay prison. Elizabeth, on the other hand, remained in what now represented the stateroom in Westminster, where she devoted herself to merry-making. After some music, singing, and dancing the play proper opened with Schiller’s Act II.2: the visit of the French delegation asking, on behalf of their King, for Elizabeth’s hand. Why did B not stick to the author’s sequence, opening the play with Mary in the Fotheringhay prison? Undoubtedly because given the fact that the play ends with Elizabeth deserted by everyone, it would be dramatically effective to open it with a strongly contrasting situation: Elizabeth as the mighty ruler of a strong nation, surrounded by loyal subjects. Seated on a simple wooden chair representing her throne, Elizabeth addressed the French ambassador, Lord Aubespine, in his own language:

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Comte! Je plains ces nobles seigneurs que leur zèle galant a conduits ici à travers la mer de ne pas retrouver chez moi la splendeur de Saint Germain.

She then continued to address him in Swedish, that is, what was supposed to be her own English language. With Schiller the complete dialogue is in German, including the quoted lines. Why did B change these lines and some other polite phrases in this scene into French, understandable only to part of his audience? French is the language of diplomacy. Diplomacy serves to retain smooth relations with foreign powers. This means obligatory pretence. By using French B’s Elizabeth was formally being exceedingly obliging – to compensate for her temperance with regard to the issue at hand: the marriage to the French Dauphin. Pretence was also what she needed as head of the nation in relation to Mary. When Elizabeth had declared that the Dauphin might hope for her hand and Aubespine had answered that he desired more than a hope, the sequence continued: elizabeth leans forward. What does he wish? She pulls a ring from her finger and contemplates it. The four men forming the French delegation turn to each other, laughing. elizabeth turns head frontally. A queen has nothing that separates her from a common woman! Turns head back. Stretches out her right arm to aubine. See here the symbol of our duty to serve. Gets up, goes to aubine who, like everyone, kneels. She pulls another ring from her finger. Give his Royal Highness this ring. She hands him the ring.

A seemingly neutral question by the Queen – “What does he wish?” – contained erotic undertones through her tone of voice and the reaction of the Frenchmen. These undertones spilt over to her following remark even if it was directed not to Aubine but to the audience – being a general, ‘democratic’ statement. When the red-dressed ministers and advisors behind Elizabeth knelt to mark the significance of the deliverance of the ring, a row of upright soldiers in grey uniforms behind them became visible. Hidden by the diplomacy was the military power.

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In Scene 2 the audience witnessed the locations of the two queens simultaneously. In the foreground was the Fotheringhay prison, in the background a room in Westminster. While Mary and her faithful nurse Hanna, in simple black dresses,2 were complaining to their warder Paulet about the unjust treatment of Mary, Elizabeth’s confidants Burleigh and Talbot were seen on either side of her empty high chair in the middle behind the a long table, a hint of Elizabeth’s “absence” with regard to Mary’s fate;3 Leicester was leaning nonchalantly against the right wall, while Elizabeth behind him was talking to her ladies in waiting. All were in royal red. Elizabeth’s vacillation between Burleigh who, acting like a prosecutor, argued for capital punishment, and Talbot who acted like a defender, was clarified in the next scene. Here what was merely background in the former scene became the central setting and the characters came alive and began to talk. Elizabeth now took her seat in her high chair centre and listened to the alternatives with regard to Mary suggested by the three men around her: immediate execution (Burleigh), postponement of it (Talbot), and execution if there was an attempt to set Mary free (Leicester). The plot gets underway when Mortimer, Paulet’s nephew, turns up in Fotheringhay and tells Mary how he, brought up as a Puritan, during his journey to Italy and France has converted to Catholicism. Enchanted by the visual and aural richness of the catholic cathedrals he had discovered how beauty and religion could come together. His enchantment with “the music drifting down from paradise,” a line deleted by B, was restored in the form of soft choir background singing accompanying Mortimer’s enthusiastic description of the catholic churches, so different from “the somber Puritan prayer-houses” he had been brought up with. Mortimer’s reason for seeing Mary is to tell her about his plan to liberate her. She counters him by saying that only one person could do this: Leicester. It seems a mystery, as Mortimer points out, why Mary should see Leicester of all people who had voted for her death as the one to do this. Schiller here seems to allude to the historical circumstance that Elizabeth had suggested Leicester as a suitable match for Mary before she married Darnley; perhaps also to the possibility that Elizabeth could have been ignorant of Leicester’s voting for Mary’s execution. But few if any in the audience would be aware 2 Schiller has Mary enter “in a veil holding a crucifix.” The production script has her enter quite realistically “in a jumper, limping, supported by a cane” a stage direction neglected in the performance. 3 During the talks leading to Mary’s death penalty the stately chair under the canopy remained empty.

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of these circumstances; and the historical surveys in theatre program did not provide any help in this matter. In the next scene, Mortimer pretended to Elizabeth that his conversion to Catholicism was necessary to enable him to spy on those in France who were planning a coup d’état in England. She believed him and asked him in veiled terms to see to it that Mary would be killed: elizabeth. Well, good luck! I must hide my gratefulness. Her hand touches mortimer’s calf and caresses him up to his shoulder. Be not sorry about that! Most confidential and strongest are the ties made in greatest secrecy.

The erotic gesture was B’s addition. The clandestine murder would, it seemed, be clandestinely sexually rewarded. Leicester who had been Elizabeth’s favourite – the Swedish translation calls him älskare (lover) – reproaches her for considering marriage with the French Dauphin who had never seen her and thus only loved “her reputation” – whereas he, Leicester, loved Elizabeth herself; this was a dubious truth by someone trained in stratagems. Elizabeth countered by saying that as head of a nation she could not, like Mary, “listen to the voice of the heart.” B had her at this moment push Leicester down and, her dress spread out, hierarchically sit on him for a moment of sexual satisfaction. As if accustomed to this behaviour on the part of the Queen, three ladies in waiting appeared and hid the couple from the environment by holding up a red cover behind them. Making shrewd use of the situation, Leicester, when Elizabeth was having her orgasm, suggested that she and Mary meet in secret. “You could then for the first time enjoy your victory.” Sexual mission accomplished, both stood up and regarded themselves in the mirror just brought in by a lady in waiting. As soon as Elizabeth had left, Leicester approached this lady and began to caress her breast. While Elizabeth’s caressing of Mortimer demonstrated how sexuality was used to convey a particular purpose, her intercourse with Leicester was motivated by a complex mix of “Debauchery. Genuine and pretended,” as it says in the production script. In the middle of the play Schiller places his climax, the unhistorical meeting between the two queens, in the park of Fotheringhay with “a wide view in the distance.” B opened the scene with a projection of driving clouds in the background against an ominously red sky – symbols of freedom, since the clouds are free to move from England to her beloved France. Hanna was standing alone upstage looking at the sky in the background. As Mary was

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slowly coming up from the background a female voice was heard singing a Scottish folk song about love. Informed that Elizabeth was hunting in the vicinity and might appear any moment, Mary was taken by surprise and found herself between fear and hope. Was Elizabeth’s sudden appearance a sign of reconciliation? B had Elizabeth come up from the background followed by Leicester. In her hunting pants, high boots, and with her riding weal she looked masculine and authoritarian. Pretending that the meeting was accidental, she remained standing until Mary had approached her and knelt to her, obviously in the hope that Elizabeth had come to reconcile herself with her cousin. Elizabeth addressed her to begin with respectfully as “Lady Mary,” then when the climate between them had deteriorated more formally as “Lady Stuart.” She increased her haughtiness by taunting the Catholic Church. Pointing to Mary with her weal she cruelly remarked that Mary owed her reputation of beauty simply to the fact that she was a “common woman.”4 After this humiliation Mary could no longer repress her hatred: mary. That I am human, Stands up from her crawling position. elizabeth turns her back to her. I have never concealed. I have despised false semblance. But you have everything to fear if one day the virtuous disguise is torn away revealing all your wild debauchery. Close to elizabeth. You did not inherit virtue from your mother. Hand to womb. Moves away from elizabeth, with outstretched arm. Everyone knows what kind of virtue leicester takes hold of her from behind. caused Anne Boleyn elizabeth strikes with her weal. to loose her life!5

After this crushing accusation, Leicester took Elizabeth away, as Mary shouted after them: England’s throne was polluted by the daughter of a whore. 4 In the source text (Schiller, 2010: III.6): “Es kostet nichts, die allgemeine Schönheit / Zu sein, als die gemeine sein für alle!” 5 Elizabeth’s mother Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, was executed on charges of adultery and incest. According to the historical consensus she was not wholly innocent.

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If right and truth existed, you would kneel to me, and I would be the monarch.

Laughing triumphantly, Mary lay down on her back, raised her bare legs and spread her arms. Was it the expression of someone who at last had been able to let off steam? Was it the mock-position of a whore? Or was it a gesture of hubris that would presumably soon be punished?6 The sky had suddenly turned pitch-black and when Mary cried out “This was the moment of triumph!” distant thunder could be heard. Mary had with this “triumph” effectuated what she would prevent: the death sentence over herself. Back in the prison Mary was visited by Mortimer who declared that a group of conspirators were ready to liberate her. B had him kiss Mary and she returned his kiss by putting her arm around his back; after all, he was to be her liberator. But when he became more insistent, she released herself from him. Suddenly O’Kelly, in black, one of the conspirators, entered to tell Mortimer that Elizabeth had been attacked. A big, ominously red sun was at this moment projected on the backdrop. When O’Kelly said “Our queen must die,”7 Mortimer believed he meant Elizabeth whereas he meant Mary. Only later did he – artificially but effectively in dramatic terms – reveal that Elizabeth had survived the attack. The sequence was accompanied by soft organ music and showed Mary and Elizabeth, as in the prelude, slowly approaching from the background at the head of the royal court, while in the foreground the plotters threading necklaces – with, presumably, miniature portraits of Mary, as talismans – over each other’s heads. Mary and Elizabeth were at this moment seen right behind them in a spot covering all four, the two queens turned away from each other. Mortimer’s “If Mary may not live, I don’t want to live” was followed by a loud thunder clap concluding Part One. Leicester had for years been Elizabeth’s lover. But since she prevents him from reaching his goal, the English throne, he considers the possibility of doing so through Mary. Like Mortimer he is highly involved with both women. But whereas Mortimer is actively pursuing his goal, Leicester is from a distance observing if Mortimer’s plan to kill Elizabeth and liberate Mary will work out and be of use to himself. When the conspiracy is 6 The word ‘presumably’ indicates the suspense the audience would sense were this a fictitious drama. But since Mary Stuart is a historical play, we know the outcome if we know the historical facts. The suspense in the play and in performances of it is therefore to the knowledgeable part of the audience not so much what will happen as rather how will it happen (Pütz, 1970: 15). 7 A quid pro quo leading to a reversal when it is clarified whom “queen” refers to.

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revealed, Schiller’s Mortimer commits suicide. Released of a disturbing witness Leicester pretends ignorance of the conspiracy and saves his skin. While the two men were conspiring together B significantly dressed them identically in royal red; after the plot had been discovered Mortimer was in black, whereas Leicester, always smoothly non-committal, retained his red dress. B made Leicester more villainous by having Mortimer not commit suicide but be killed at his order. As soon as the two conspirators had separated, Leicester told the Officer of the Queen’s Guard: “Take care of the traitor to the realm, Sir Mortimer!” Four soldiers in black uniforms entered and seized Mortimer, whereupon the Officer, in royal red, knifed him to death. To Elizabeth Leicester later pretended that he had discovered Mortimer’s plan to liberate Mary and kill Elizabeth. “When I had him imprisoned, he took his life,” B’s Leicester lied to the Queen. When Burleigh, always the sceptical realist, doubted the truth of Leicester’s story, Leicester called for the Officer to confirm it. Mortimer, the Officer said, had cursed “our queen” and then drawn his knife. “It happened instantly /and he fell dead to the floor.” This said, the Officer was immediately sent away by Leicester. The Officer’s vague description of Mortimer’s end had fulfilled its purpose: to verify Leicester’s (false) version of Mortimer’s death. That Leicester so easily could get away with his lie was due to the fact that – in this play full of plots – he had a hold on Elizabeth after having revealed to her and Burleigh that he was aware that she had clandestinely asked Mortimer to have Mary assassinated. Burleigh, Elizabeth‘s and above all Protestant England’s faithful protector, always insisted on capital punishment for Mary. B presented him as the conscientious and energetic civil servant, always with his portfolio containing relevant documents in his hand. After Davison, as Secretary of State and Burleigh’s personal secretary, had brought in a high white table with Mary’s still unsigned death sentence on it, Burleigh appeared to the left of it, Talbot to the right. They were identically dressed and carried black staffs in their hands, symbols of impending death. Repeating their earlier contrasting views, the former pleaded for immediate execution, the latter warned that a dead Mary would be more dangerous than a Mary kept alive. From the beginning of the scene, Elizabeth, contemplating, moved back and forth in the foreground, indicating her vacillation. So did Mary, worrying about the outcome, in the background. Mirroring each other, they demonstrated how preoccupied the potential executioner and her victim were with each other at this moment. The audience had reason to ask: Who suffered the most? Left alone, Elizabeth recalled how Mary had dared mock before Leicester. “My lover, my love she has stolen,” she sighed. It was at this moment that B

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had her sign the fatal document, an indication that rather than concerns for her country or even for her own life it was personal humiliation and jealousy that made her decide.8 To calm down she then sat down and smoked a cigarille. Telling Davison that she had signed the death sentence but that “a paper does not decide everything, a name / doesn’t need to kill,” she took the non-committal attitude of a Pilate and handed the responsibility over to her confused and desperate subject: davison. […] Let me be excused from serving you in this horrible matter! elizabeth. Do your official duty! Turns around, leaves.

Now Burleigh appeared and, eager to have the matter settled quickly, tore the fatal document from Davison, releasing him of a heavy responsibility but at the same time promoting a decision that the Queen might not recognise as hers – as indeed she does at the end of the play. Discordant music, followed by tolling of a church bell bridged the scene to the following, set in the Fotheringhay prison. A black-dressed man with a white staff, a figure of death seen earlier behind Mary, entered from right, followed by a procession of black-dressed, mourning women, headed by Mary.9 The black-dressed man could also be seen as an incarnation of all those mourning Mary’s fate; Melvil, her most faithful male friend, admonished Hanna: “let us accompany her / as support and staff on her way to death!” Hanna and Margaret Kurl took a black gown off Mary and revealed a darkred velvet dress underneath it, a big cross hanging on her breast, her arms now spread out in cross-form. Mary herself took off her black hood, exposing

8 Schiller too has Elizabeth sign Mary’s death sentence primarily for private reasons. B followed the author in this but stressed, more than him, the erotic rivalry. It is questionable whether this helped cure what may seem a flaw in the play: that the humiliation in Fotheringhay Park was witnessed by no outsider, was in other words not publicly known, and therefore seems a rather poor reason for Elizabeth’s signing of the death sentence. The historical reason for the signing was quite different: the conviction of a court of 36 noblemen that Mary had sanctioned an attempted assassination of Elizabeth. 9 Schiller has Mary in this scene (V.6) enter “dressed in white, as if for a feast.” This was traditionally the colour of mourning in France at the time and also the colour that Mary favoured. But to B’s audience the significance of a white dress would have been unintelligible. The man with a pale face, black clothing, and white staff heading a procession mourning someone sentenced to death, recalls the situation close to the end of The Seventh Seal, where Death with his scythe leads the six “sentenced” victims as black silhouettes to the after-life.

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her short white hair. This undressing in imitatio Christi was an echo of what happened at the real execution.10 After Margaret Kurl had disclosed that her husband, once Mary’s secretary, had witnessed falsely and that the death sentence therefore was unjust, Mary took leave of the maids that had been allowed her in the prison. She gave Hanna the napkin in which her “tears had been woven” when she was embroidering it. “With this you shall bind my eyes / when the time comes.” 11 When Mary was denied a Catholic priest, Melvil fulfilled the role of confessor; he gave her the bread and the wine and God’s forgiveness for her grave sin toward Darnley.12 After this black-dressed people crowded in from all sides. Only Elizabeth and Mary in their red dresses, which in the context seemed more a colour of blood than of royalty, stood out from the rest. During the rest of the scene Elizabeth stood completely still in the background by the right wall, her right hand raised against it, an ominous mene, mene, tekel gesture: “you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting” (Daniel 5: 25-28). Burleigh, who had come to hear Mary‘s last wishes, had by this time taken over the white staff. Three times he struck the floor with it.13 On her way to the scaffold Mary passed by Leicester. She ran to him, embraced him, kissed him, took a few steps back and said: “Farewell and if you can be happy! / Kneel before Elizabeth! / May your reward not be a punishment! Farewell!” Clearly moved at seeing Leicester, she fell down and was helped up by Melvil and Hanna. Together they slowly disappeared down in the black background. Mary’s forgiveness for the man who had betrayed her was a crushing experience for Leicester. Alone on the stage Schiller’s Leicester in a soliloquy voices his deep remorse: 10 Before Mary was beheaded her outer garments were removed, unveiling a velvet petticoat and a pair of sleeves in crimson-brown, the liturgical colour of martyrdom in the Catholic Church. When the executioner held her head aloft and declared, “God save the Queen,” the auburn tresses in his hand turned out to be a wig and the decapitated head exposed Mary’s own short grey hair. 11 The napkin recalls the Veil of Veronica on which Christ’s face appeared. Before being executed Mary was blindfolded by Hanna Kennedy with a white veil embroidered in gold, knelt down on the cushion in front of the block, on which she positioned her head, stretched out her arms and said: “In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum” (Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit). 12 “Here lies the crux of the drama,” Stahl (1954: 109) notes. “Maria, innocent of the crime of which she stands accused and for which she is about to be executed, accepts her fate as a token that God has forgiven her real crime.” 13 In the context this might recall the threefold crying of the cock corresponding to Peter’s threefold denial of Christ (Mat. 26: 75), the Commander’s threefold knocking on Don JuanAntony’s door in Molière’s Don Juan before sending him to hell.

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[…] Why does no abyss Open to swallow this reproach to nature! […] She goes from me, before my very eyes Changing into an angel, leaving me To inescapable damnation’s howls!

B cut these melodramatic lines and showed instead by action, light, and sound their essential message: leicester moves to the foreground, a spot on his pale face in frontal position. He takes off his glove from his left hand that holds a miniature portrait of mary. I am still alive! Can I endure that? Turns around, goes upstage. Low drum beats and bangs. When he sees elizabeth still standing by the right wall, he returns front, kneels down, opens a lid in the floor and looks down. Strong light from below on his face. Are they already at it? Now I hear voices… I must flee from this house of death. The drum beats grow increasingly loud. He closes the lid. Darkness.

The spot on Leicester’s face seemed like a visual mirror of Mary’s decapitated head once the axe had fallen. Realistically Leicester was opening the lid to the lit area below where the scaffold was being prepared. Symbolically he was opening it to an abyss: the hell in store for him. The last scene, set in Elizabeth’s room, opened with a bell striking five. Elizabeth appeared in a red nightgown. Behind her a big grey chest, the size of a coffin.14 In front of the chest a small table and a diminutive chair, both grey. Standing by the chest – with the stair-like furniture in front of it not unlike a scaffold – Elizabeth was waiting to hear the verdict of the commission. Talbot entered, informing her that Kurl’s decisive evidence had been false, a piece of information which should cause the Queen, she said, to call for a new trial. When Davison a little later told her that the fatal 14 Mary’s body was embalmed and left in a lead coffin until her burial several months later (Fraser, 1994: 541).

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document was in Burleigh’s hands, Elizabeth feared that this would have sealed the matter. This was confirmed when Burleigh entered and declared that the capital punishment had indeed been effectuated. Elizabeth now rid herself of all responsibility by bluntly declaring that she had judged Mary’s case just and mercifully, but that Burleigh had “thwarted her mercy.” She tore off the seal from his breast, dropped it on the floor and banished him “from her sight forever.” Burleigh raised his portfolio in protest and let it fall to the floor with all the papers in it spreading around the floor. After which he himself dropped down on all fours and began to cry. Soldiers in black uniforms entered and dragged both Burleigh, now without portfolio, and Davison out. Sacrificing her faithful servants Elizabeth had managed to keep up appearance – except to the audience – and save her glory in the interest both of herself and the state. When Talbot, whose advice that the Queen should judge Mary mercifully had been neglected, declared that he wished to resign his post as advisor, Elizabeth called for Leicester, her only remaining friend. Preparing to meet him, she loosened her hair, sat down on the chest and moved her hands from her breast to her womb. After a knocking on the door right, the voice of the Officer announced: “Lord Leicester sends his apologies. / He is on his way to France.” Music reminiscent of a boat whistle turning into a siren was heard. The lilac light on the walls increased, then “strong sunset light” (production script) streamed from left, delineating the shadow of Elizabeth’s head on the right wall. Slowly she turned and entered barefoot the chestcum-scaffold and looked out of the window. Meanwhile (the ghost of) Mary, her face in strong white light, entered in her red velvet dress downstage right and kneeled. At this moment her shadow on the right wall mingled with Elizabeth’s. She looked at the cross in her hands, put it down on the floor, bent forward, spread her arms to form a cross and let her head suddenly drop as if under the axe as the sound of the siren stopped. Sudden darkness. The reception was on the whole very favourable. Ring in Svenska Dagbladet called it “a beautiful staging about eros and agape” and “an exquisite mixture of subtle aesthetics, will, and self-evident power.” Schwartz in Expressen was impressed by Koroly’s colourful costumes, closer to “Schiller’s 19th century than English 16th century.” Zern in Dagens Nyheter found B’s attempt to make a passion play out of Schiller’s drama impressive but he lacked the danger in Leicester’s part that is usually his contribution to Elizabeth’s dilemma. Several critics felt that B had turned the theatre into a cathedral but they disagreed in their evaluation of this device. There was a guest performance of the production in New York.

15. Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts Ibsen’s Gengangere has always, for want of a better word, been entitled Ghosts in English. The play also has a subtitle, A Domestic Drama in Three Acts, which highlights the author’s questioning of the family as an institution – as he had done in A Doll’s House two years earlier. Once infamous, now famous and frequently performed, Ghosts consists of a network of gradual revelations. Returning from Paris to his parental home in Norway and doomed to a premature death through syphilis, Mrs Alving’s son Osvald learns that he has inherited his illness from his promiscuous, since long deceased father and that Mrs Alving’s maid, Regine, with whom he wants to start a relationship, is actually his half-sister. The orphanage that Mrs Alving has just erected in memory of her late husband burns. Carpenter Engstrand, once paid off to play the role of Regine’s father, persuades the naïve Pastor Manders that it is Manders’ carelessness that has caused the fire – whereas it is obviously Engstrand himself who has done so. Engstrand promises to keep the reason for the fire secret, thereby saving Manders’ reputation. In return for this Manders promises to help Engstrand start “a seaman’s home” entitled Court Chamberlain Alving’s Memorial Home to replace the burned orphanage. Yet, since the seaman’s home is Engstrand’s euphemism for a brothel, the new “Captain Alving’s Memorial Home” ironically becomes a home, not for orphans, but for those who beget them – promiscuous men and women – and in this sense a home in the image of Alving. Having discovered that Alving is her real father and that a relationship with her half-brother Osvald therefore is impossible, Regine leaves, presumably to take up a job as a prostitute in Engstrand’s brothel. Left alone with his mother, Osvald hands her a mortal dose of morphine and asks her to give it to him when the illness reduces him to a helpless child – which soon occurs. Leaning over her now demented son, Mrs Alving hesitates to give him “the last service.” There the play ends. Usually considered a prime example of naturalistic drama, Ghosts strictly adheres to the unities of time and place. Set in the same room for all the three acts, the play begins shortly before noon, we may assume, and ends at sunrise the next day. The place of action is “mrs Alving’s country estate by a large fjord in western Norway,” reached by steamer from the middle-sized town in the area, where Manders apparently lives. The period of action is not explicitly mentioned but we may assume that it coincides with time when the play was published: 1880.

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As often with Ibsen, the stage is divided into three marked areas: two rooms, contrasting with one another, and the exterior beyond them. The symbolic tri-partition shows an interior (culture), an exterior (nature) and an area in between (the conservatory), more or less corresponding to the play’s ideological contrast between a socio-religious, duty-bound view of life and a hedonistic faith in life for life’s sake, in joie de vivre, a key concept in the play. B’s production of Ghosts – his last stage production – was based on his own translation and adaption of Ibsen’s play. In the following, I shall discuss the adaptation and the performance in turn. The theatre program had on its cover Edvard Munch’s etching Tête-à-tête (1905), showing a black male face and a red-haired female face turned both toward and away from each other, suggesting that the ambiguous motherson relationship in the play stood central in the production. In a postscript in the program B reveals that it was the first time he had translated a play. The incentive to do so and to adapt the text came, he says, from reading Ibsen’s drama in the light of Strindberg’s domestic drama The Pelican,1 originally called “Sömngångare” (Sleepwalkers), a title very similar to Ibsen’s Gengangere. After a few remarks on Ghosts, the postscript continues: After a long professional life, characterized by a passion which the Germans ironically used to call Werktreue [faithfulness to the text] I have picked up the big steel scissors and cut the Ibsenean iron corset to pieces, while leaving the basic motifs untouched. […] A violent discussion about so-called free love I have done away with. Pastor Manders is no longer a clerical caricature. He is an anguished and emotionally confused human being. Both Osvald and Regine have received more space. Carpenter Engstrand [...] remains the way he is and Mrs Alving is […] both victim and hangman, at once sophisticated liar and merciless teller of the truth [...].

In an interview he declared that he had “rewritten about 30 percent” of the play (Sjögren, 2002: 245). In his production of Ghosts at the Big Stage2 B divided Ibsen’s three-act play into two parts, separated by an intermission. Part One corresponded 1 B staged this play twice and was preparing a radio version to be broadcast in March 2002, shortly after the premiere of Ghosts. 2 The production was originally designed for the Paint Room, B told Sjögren (2002: 246) but when it appeared that the Big Stage lacked a program the production was moved there.

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to Ibsen’s Act I, Part Two to Acts II-III. For his abbreviated description of the setting of the play B stipulates in his adaptation: A country estate by the fjord. Salon, living room, dining room and hall. Opulent, tasteful, well preserved. A large window facing rain, mist and bare fruit trees.

We later learn that the country estate is located a six-hour train journey from Oslo; since the Norwegian capital changed its name from Kristiania to Oslo in 1925, we can conclude that the action takes place after this year. The bare trees combined with the rain help to indicate that it is autumn. Ibsen’s three spatial areas are increased to five, including the exterior. The setting in the performance was rather different from that suggested in the adaptation. Practically all the visible space consisted of a living room, corresponding to Ibsen’s garden room, with upstage, centre, a tall window showing bare trees in the mist outside. To the left of it a library with rows of elegant old books could be glimpsed through a half-open door. On the forestage, centre, a broken-down gate, signalling decay. By having Engstrand enter the house from the auditorium through this gate and by having the characters face the audience when they later discovered that the orphanage was on fire, B suggested that front garden and orphanage were located in the auditorium. The symbol of the life-lie was in this way, as it were, made commune bonum. With a handy visual exposition the audience is in B’s adaptation immediately introduced to all the characters as in a tableau vivant: mrs helene alving is sitting at her desk bent over a big book. […] regine is in the dining room, busily polishing silver spoons. osvald is sleeping on the sofa in the living room. Carpenter jacob engstrand is standing in the hall. […] Pastor gabriel manders, still outside with portfolio and umbrella, is soon to enter.

Each of them is placed in a separate space, an indication, perhaps, of their isolation. Attributes and activities help to characterise them. In the performance only the two women were seen in the opening, Mrs Alving in the library reading her red book and Regine in the dining room polishing a silver pot. Engstrand appeared a little later, climbing up from the auditorium through the decayed gate, a black shadow from the underworld covering his head and shoulders with a dark coat against the heavy rain. Manders appeared later, as did Osvald when the revolving stage showed

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him lying on the sofa in the living room, a position recalling the habitual one of his father. Ibsen’s Manders and Alving lack a Christian name. And his characters address each other formally with “Pastor Manders,” “Mrs Alving,” etc. B’s characters were more informal. Pastor Manders was appropriately given the Christian name of Archangel Gabriel, and Mrs Alving called her late husband Erik, the name of B’s clergyman father – an indication that Osvald, the artist, had something in common with the artistic son of this conservative Swedish priest.3 The intimate forms of address concern also the pronouns. Unlike English, both Norwegian and Swedish know a formal and an informal way of addressing. In Norwegian, the formal address is De, in Swedish it is Ni. The informal address is in both languages du. Ibsen’s Manders addresses Regine with a formal De, B’s with an informal du. And while Ibsen’s Mrs Alving and Manders, despite their long and once intimate friendship, seem surprisingly formal in their way of addressing each other – an aspect of “the art of sweeping under the rug”4 – B’s two characters addressed each other with their Christian names. As usual with B, the production combined realistic traits with theatrical ones. When Mrs Alving was seen reading outside the library left and Regine and Engstrand were talking in the living room next to it, there was no wall separating her from them; the spectators were simply asked to imagine a wall between them. And when Osvald and Regine at the end of Part One were seen in an erotic game, the spectators were, similarly, asked to imagine a wall between the dining room where this game took place and the living room where Mrs Alving and Manders found themselves. The mirror downstage in front of which first Regine, then Manders made themselves presentable was likewise imaginary; only from their mimicry could the spectators grasp its existence. Both the scenery, in a style between empire and art nouveau, and the costumes were relatively monochrome. The elegant furniture – sofa, table, and chairs – were in light brown wood, covered by green velvet.5 The soft, dark-green, curtain-like walls of the high-ceilinged room, topped by a row 3 B’s paternal family circumstances were by this time well-known to many Swedes and the critics often saw Osvald’s rage and desperation in terms of young Ingmar’s reaction to his paternal environment. Cf. B’s remark in the prompt script: “The B family and the façade. I Know Because I Was There.” 4 This is the title of the second part of B’s TV serial Scenes from a Marriage. 5 The sofa was a replica of the one in Edvard Munch’s painting The Room of the Aunts from 1874 (Steene, 2009: 48).

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of lamps, made the setting look theatrical, especially since a tall birch with green leaves painted on the left wall made the wall look like a wing. The painted green birch in Part One – green for hope – strongly contrasted with the ‘real’ bare trees outside the window. In Part Two, the birch had lost its leaves and was moreover surrounded by walls turned almost black in which a black cross pattern could vaguely be discerned. Painted on the same left wall behind the birch tree was a huge classical column with the lower part draped in a cloth. Presumably indicating the monument about to be inaugurated as well as serving as a visual extension of the enacted period and thereby universalising the theme of the play, it matched the life-size sculpture of a semi-nude woman to the right. Together with the grandfather clock left, this sculpture was a quotation from B’s third and fourth productions of The Ghost Sonata. For those who were aware of this piece of auto-intertextuality, it was tempting to regard the sculpture in Ghosts as a visual link between Regine and young Mrs Alving, especially since the latter, as we have seen, had indicated that the two had a close affinity. Both in the drama text and in the adaptation little is said about the characters’ outward appearance. The costumes in the performance suggested the time of Ibsen’s text, the 1880s, rather than that of the action, after 1925 – a pretty façade and at the same time the outward indication of “age-old, rotten ideas” – I quote Mrs Alving – “that have us in their grip.” The parallel between Regine and Mrs Alving was suggested in Act I in their long dresses, similar in cut but slightly different in their material and in their shades of red. The sharp red vertical streaks in Mrs Alving’s dress recalled not only regal splendour but also open wounds – connecting them with the red wound B placed on Osvald’s head. Pastor Manders was dressed in violet from top to toe, a colour that in Christian symbolism indicates penitence and is especially connected with the Passion Week. Osvald, being an artist, was more informal in his grey trousers and sweater. In Act II Mrs Alving appeared in a long, simple ash-violet dress, in colour a hybrid of the two men’s costumes and in tune with the weather outside. In the final act, playing at night, she wore a violet nightgown, Osvald light blue striped pyjamas. Ibsen’s Mrs Alving has a lot of books on her table. After merely glancing at some of them, Manders reproaches her for her reading. B had him pick up the single book mentioned in his text, apparently the one Mrs Alving was reading when the play opened. Adding the name of the author and the title of the book – it concerned a certain Malene Didrichsen’s The Modern Woman – B had Manders quote from it:

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The women of today are indoctrinated as daughters, sisters, wives and mothers. They are rarely educated according to their capabilities. And they are thwarted in carrying out their profession. Mentally embittered, they are the mothers of the next generation. What will the consequences be?

Manders commented: “Old nagging and grumbling that has no relevance in today’s equal society.” While his comment must have seemed ridiculous to an audience when applied to the 1920s, it was a provocation when related to their own situation. Obliquely it raised the question: How equal was the Swedish society in 2002? Was Manders’ reaction still tenable?6 As a matter of fact both the name of the writer and the title of the book had been invented by B to disguise the fact that the quotation was almost verbatim taken from one of Ibsen’s notes for Ghosts (Ibsen, 1932: 136). In this devious way B amusingly mustered the playwright himself to support Mrs Alving in her controversy with Manders, although exceedingly few in the audience would be aware of it. While passing over this theft in silence, B in his postscript admits that he has stolen “a few lines from The Pelican and The Ghost Sonata.” In The Pelican the Son accuses his Mother of fundamental hypocrisy, an accusation echoed when B’s Osvald told his mother that her life had been a “gigantic lie.” In The Ghost Sonata, the Student, having entered the attractive house visualised on the stage, discovers that it is rotten to the core; similarly, when returning to his attractive parental home, B’s Osvald, quoting the Student, found that “there is something very rotten here.” Indicative of his illness – he called himself a “living dead” – Osvald was deathly pale. For the ugly wound on his head no explanation was given in the play. To Steene (2009: 50) it was “the outer sign of [his] destroyed brain, the syphilitic heritage from his father.” By extension one might see it as a symbolic crown of thorns; Osvald is, after all, an innocent victim. Yet not until the other characters knew about Osvald’s fatal illness, could they see the significance of the wound. Even then they never asked how it had come about. Was it the director’s way of indicating the human environment’s indifference to suffering, an expansion of Osvald’s accusation that his mother is indifferent to him, unable to love? When he momentarily put on a red clown’s nose it was a grim mocking of his heavy drinking and a stoic way of laughing at his own condition. For insiders it was also a reference 6 Cf. Johan’s conservative views, as opposed to Marianne’s, on female emancipation after their visit to a production of A Doll’s House in Scenes from a Marriage.

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to Rank in B’s A Doll’s House, appearing at the fancy-dress ball with a red clown’s nose, he too doomed to death through inherited syphilis. “As a metaphor,” B notes in the postscript, Osvald’s illness is “unsurpassable.” Syphilis can be either congenital, transmitted from the mother before birth, or acquired through contact with an infected person, usually through sexual intercourse. Ibsen has the Parisian doctor claim that in Osvald’s case the biblical saying that “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children” was applicable, a euphemistic paraphrase for the fact that Osvald had inherited his syphilis from his father. B was even more explicit when he had Osvald tell the doctor in Paris that he had never “been together with either woman or man” – note the updated reference to homosexuality. In Ibsen’s time it was scandalous to mention syphilis by its right name, and so his characters do not do so. In the postscript B notes that he has “retained Ibsen’s decision never to mention the name of the mortal illness.” However, B’s reason – he had the doctor say that Osvald suffered from “a blood sickness” and that he “was infected already in the womb” – was another one. As several critics have observed, the vague description of the illness has the advantage that it applies not only to syphilis but also to AIDS, an illness which in 2002 was comparable to syphilis in the 1880s or 1920s in the sense that it was considered both shameful, incurable, and mortal. Here again B proved anxious to make the play as threateningly relevant to his audience as it was to Ibsen’s in his time. That the symptoms may not agree very well with those of AIDS is of little importance compared to the “unsurpassable” metaphoric value of the unnamed illness. Unlike Ibsen, B had Mrs Alving tell Manders that her husband had been not only debauched but also “cruel”: mrs alving. –yes, he [Alving] became seriously ill. But that didn’t prevent him! I, too, became – Grows silent.

Shortly after she got married Mrs Alving fled to Manders. Ibsen’s explanation is vague: she felt “utterly miserable.” B pointed rather to her love for Manders; according to him she had cried: “here I am, take me, take me.” Manders avertingly referred to her duty to return to her family. “You were afraid,” B’s Mrs Alving says, “because you knew I was ill.” This can only mean that Manders suspected Mrs Alving had been infected by her husband’s syphilis and was afraid of being infected by her. Ibsen briefly tells us that Mrs Alving’s loveless marriage was arranged by her mother and two aunts. B tells a different story in his text:

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mrs alving. […] I wanted to get away from home. Mother and father were very keen. And Erik was so lovable. For my father who was nearly bankrupt it was a splendid move. I never dared to ask myself what I was really thinking or wishing. Smiles. I had suddenly been given a major role.

In Ibsen’s text Manders has in the past been a friend both of Alving and Mrs. But after she had confessed her love for him, he chose to keep away from the Alvings altogether. B elaborated on this. Manders and Alving, his parson memorised, became friends at the university. A poor theologian of simple origin, Manders admired the intelligent, distinguished Alving, whose parents, moreover, had helped him financially to complete his studies. Manders’ favourable view of Alving had to do with these circumstances. B also established a more balanced distribution of guilt between the parents. While Ibsen merely suggests that Alving’s sexual aberrations may have been a consequence of his feeling unloved by his wife, B had Mrs Alving reveal that after the birth of the illegitimate Regine, she closed her bedroom door to her husband. Denied sexual intercourse with his wife, Alving had to seek it elsewhere. It is Ibsen’s Engstrand who, presumably deliberately, causes the fire of the orphanage in a complicated attempt to snare Manders for his own seaman’s home. Unlike Ibsen, who indicates that Engstrand deliberately sets fire to the orphanage, B made Osvald the incendiary.7 He had Osvald eavesdrop when Mrs Alving revealed to Manders: “All the horrible things concerning chamberlain Alving will soon be obliterated. All that is nauseating, evil, threatening–-I don’t know, there are no words. I never talk about this.” This gave his Osvald the idea to set fire to the orphanage which his mother had called “a monument to a lie.”8 When the orphanage burned all the characters gathered on the forestage. The red fire was reflected in their faces as they looked straight into the auditorium where the imaginary orphanage was placed. Manders, thinking of the sad consequences for his reputation this might lead to, kneeled and cried: “God, my God why have you forsaken me!” Highly ironical in his 7 B’s inspiration, as far as Osvald is concerned, came from The Pelican which ends with the Son setting fire to his own home, thereby killing his vampire mother, his sister and himself. 8 The explanations regarding the source of the f ire between Engstrand and Manders, B found, are “far-fetched. It is much more likely that it is Osvald’s rage and illness and constant drunkenness [...] that make him set fire to it” (Sjögren, 2002: 242). B was disappointed that the critics did not notice that it was Osvald with his sooty clothes who was the real incendiary (ibid.: 231).

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case, the outcry was very relevant for Osvald, seen behind him in a similar position. Manders’ Christian outcry was followed by Osvald’s wordless primal cry. Joining the main action to the subplot, Ibsen’s Mrs Alving draws a parallel between herself and Engstrand; just as he has ‘bought’ his wife Johanne for a sum of money, so she has ‘bought’ the rich and socially prominent Alving. Both transactions are the result of mechanisms characteristic of a hypocritical society. B further embroidered on the similarity between the two seemingly so different marriages. Thus he had Regine recall how Engstrand, always drunk, “shouted and scolded and kicked” his wife, whereupon Engstrand reminded her how Johanne had wished to leave him. This picture of the marriage was in stark contrast to what Engstrand told Manders about it. Once married to Johanne, he said, he had led a respectable life and eventually “there arose a kind of love” between man and wife. This is the inveterate liar Engstrand’s description at a moment when he was trying to regain Manders’ confidence. Engstrand was clearly offering a prettified picture of reality – as Mrs Alving had done for years. Already in the early scene with Manders, Regine demonstrated her will to trade her sexual attractiveness. In hindsight one sensed that offering to become Mander’s housemaid, she might repeat the fate of her mother Johanne, made pregnant by her landlord Alving. One reason why B much more than Ibsen stressed Manders’ erotic interest in Regine was that it helped confirm his erotic interest in Mrs Alving in the past, an attitude indicated by her but denied by Manders himself. Much later Mrs Alving declared not only that she had an invincible desire to kiss Manders; with B she actually did it. Whereupon Manders, after returning the kiss, frightened backed away with the words: “No, no, dear Helene. No, it is impossible. Pardon me, but – it is impossible.” Again the situation served to revivify what had happened between them in the past. Shortly after this Regine and Osvald were glimpsed romping around on the sofa in the background. Manders, about to leave, told Mrs Alving that they should not exaggerate the importance of what they had just witnessed. “It was perhaps merely an innocent occurrence.” Repeating his words about Alving’s cuddling with Johanne, he referred to Regine’s and Osvald’s sexual game on the sofa at the end of Act II. His statement was immediately defied as Regine and Osvald were again seen continuing their sex game. When Mrs Alving later asked Regine if she and Osvald slept together, she answered: “I want to. But he can’t.” Osvald was not impotent. He was aware that he could infect Regine with his mortal illness. Manders and Osvald, seemingly alike in their restrictiveness, were actually opposites.

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Unlike Ibsen, B suggested a parallel between Regine and Mrs Alving. An early hint of this was given when Manders mistakenly addressed the young attractive Regine as “Helene.” Toward the end the parallel was fully developed when Mrs Alving told Regine: This is how you’re thinking, my pretty Regine: I marry Osvald and then we live a few years in Paris. When Osvald’s mother is old and tired, we move back home and Regine Alving takes care of Rosengård. She manages the house, since she has the power. She builds and expands. The only decay is Osvald. It suits her rather well. Everyone thinks she is caring for her husband in an exemplary way and that the marriage is fairly happy. She then takes a lover. But in greatest secrecy. For reputation is more important than passion, isn’t it.

Her after-thought “I was probably speaking mostly about myself” clinched the parallel. Regine had been portrayed as a young Mrs Alving, Mrs Alving as an ageing Regine.9 With B ghosts stood not merely, as with Ibsen, for outworn, reactionary ideas and the hypocrisy that goes with them. His Osvald claimed that those who nourish such ideas get so impregnated with them that they actually turn into ghosts. “It is you who are the ghost,” he told his mother toward the end. The emphasis was less on ominous heritage and more on the imprint this heritage has on its inheritors. Ibsen’s play ends with a question mark: Will Mrs Alving give Osvald the mortal tablets or will she not? Will she kill her own son? This is the provocative question the dramatist hands over to the recipient. B’s ending was different. In his adaptation it reads: The sun shines brightly through the mist. The room is filled with blinding, mobile morning light. mrs alving stands by the window. osvald. Mother. mrs alving. Yes. Pause. Yes, Osvald. Turns around. osvald. Give me the sun. Pause. mrs alving. What are you saying? 9 Cf. the opening of the prompt script where it is said about Regine’s polishing of the silver spoons that they “once will become hers (dream!).” The relationship was akin to that of the Young Lady and the Mummy in B’s 1973 production of The Ghost Sonata.

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osvald. You must give me the sun. mrs alving whispers. Osvald. Tries to catch his glance. Osvald! osvald. The sun. I want the sun. Collapsing on the floor, he takes off his clothes as if it is unbearably hot. Holding him mrs alving helps him. mrs alving. Look at me! Osvald! Don’t you recognize me? osvald smiling, expressionless. You must give me the sun. mrs alving at first sits completely still, with osvald in her arms. She then gets hold of the morphine tablets and fetches a glass of wine from the table. Sits down again with osvald in her arms and feeds him. In between she lets him drink. He opens his mouth and swallows obediently, like a child.

In the performance, the sun rose, poppy-like and “cherry-red” like the soft velvet curtains which in Osvald’s fantasy were a soothing image for the softening of his brain. Sensing the warm sunlight, Osvald took off his pyjamas and rolled naked over to centre-stage. With his face turned to the sun, his back to the audience, he stretched out his left hand toward Mrs Alving and said in a clear voice: “Mother, give me the sun.” She then stretched out her right hand to meet his. He handed her the morphine tablets. And to Pärt’s piano chords, with the indication “peacefully, in an elevated and introspective manner,” she fed him the tablets and the wine. Abstaining from Ibsen’s provocative open ending, B had Mrs Alving perform euthanasia, an ending hardly less provocative, especially since it took place within a Christian framework. Osvald’s nakedness returned him to the child he once was in the remembrance of his mother. When Mrs Alving treated him to wine and tablets, as he rested in her arms, the situation combined that of a mother feeding her baby, the handing out of wafers and wine at the Holy Communion, and the pietà. Osvald had earlier told his mother: “what is this life you gave me? I don’t want it! You can take it back!” – a cruel paraphrase of Job’s 1:21: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither.” B’s final emblematic tableau, Roland Lysell in Upsala Nya Tidning observed, recalled Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel, where the Creator’s hand touches that of his creation, Adam, “but with the opposite effect.” It also recalled his Pietà, where Virgin Mary in expression and position remembers infant Jesus as she holds the dead Christ in her arms. In another sense it recalled Edvard Munch’s Vampire in which (com)passion is combined with aggression, the woman’s blood-red hair coils covering the man’s head – like a deadly wound. B’s performance opened with a loud, ominous bang in complete darkness. Retrospectively this could be understood as the death of Osvald or the

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shock this meant to Mrs Alving. When the lights came up, brittle piano chords from Arvo Pärt’s Für Aline in B minor were heard. Strongly lit, in an immobile, frontal position downstage, Mrs Alving was seen in a long black dress and dark-blue apron, looking vacantly into the auditorium. Behind her Regine was sitting in semi-darkness, a shadowy, hardly visible figure, she too immobile, frozen in her action of polishing a silver pot. The significance of this prologue was clear only in retrospect. Actually an epilogue, it showed a Mrs Alving after she had killed her son. This explains why she was dressed as if in mourning – with an apron, in cut identical with the one worn by Regine. Regine having left at the end, Mrs Alving was taking over her tasks herself; Regine’s shadowy figure behind her was now her double. With Osvald dead and Manders and Engstrand gone, Mrs Alving was now completely alone, burying herself among the memories at her country estate. Once we see the significance of the prologue-epilogue, we realise that the whole play, as presented by B, in a sense took place inside Mrs Alving’s mind – in remembrance of things past. Ibsen’s objective drama had been transformed into a dream play in which time and place were floating concepts. Interesting in this connection was that the grandfather clock showed 5 o’clock both at the beginning and at the end of the performance. Moving from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. – the hands of the clock actually did move for a while – B’s fictive playing time was a few hours shorter than Ibsen’s. Symbolically, the fact that the hands of the clock were in the same position at beginning and end seemed to indicate that time had virtually stood still or was non-existent – as it may seem to be when one recollects. Since euthanasia is still a highly controversial subject, the spectators were bound to react in various ways to Mrs Alving’s action at the end. The crucial question here was: Did B’s Mrs Alving truly love her son? Osvald had expressed doubt about this. Some spectators might in line with this argue that her decision to help her son die rested primarily on her promise to him; viewed in this way, Mrs Alving in the ending remained duty-bound, unliberated from the ghosts of the past. Other spectators might reject Osvald’s reproach and see Mrs Alving’s action as one of loving compassion, a visualisation of how the mother finally dared to give her doomed son “the helping hand” he had asked for. Unlike Ibsen, B opted for closure rather than openness in the ending with regard to Mrs Alving’s action. But the motivation for her action was left open. “When the morning light at last arrives,” Barbro Westling in Aftonbladet observed, “Mrs Alving has lost everything and she turns her vacant glance to the auditorium.” The audience were back where they began.

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Few Swedish reviewers objected to B’s adaptation in which several of them signalled autobiographical elements. Several British critics, on the other hand, found B’s version too explicit in its introduction of “clarity at the expense of tension.” By general consent the actress playing the part of Mrs Alving carried the production. There were guest performances in Oslo, London, and New York.

16. The Serious Game Each stage production is unique. Yet given the fact that one and the same director was responsible for all productions examined here, it is evident that they all had much in common. By way of summary I shall in this concluding chapter highlight some of B’s recurrent devices. Taken together they will indicate his directorial profile. Despite B’s early claim that he would never “stage a play against the writer’s intentions,” there are many suggestions that the productions examined here frequently deviated from what can be assumed to be the intention of the writer, a sign that B’s theory did not match his practice – even when the statement was made as early as the 1960s. Take the question of deletions. Early on there were deletions in virtually all B’s productions, more substantial, of course, in the longer plays than in the short plays. Of the plays dealt with here, King Lear and Peer Gynt were cut with about one third, Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale with about half. Deletions may have many causes. When the three Helmer children in A Doll’s House were reduced to one, the reduction signified an updating of the play to a present-day, divorce-minded audience. When references to Buddha in The Ghost Sonata were omitted the reason was that the audience had no relation to Buddhism. In Peer Gynt the story about the young man who cut off his finger to escape military service was deleted without any significant loss to the play and minor characters like the Memnon Statue and the Lean Man were omitted without any real harm to it. The metaphoric pig story in Long Day’s Journey could be cut without any great detriment to the plot and many of the literary allusions in the play which were alien to the audience were eliminated. More dubious was the deletion of the Prologue in A Dream Play since it meant a significant restructuring of the play. Also very short omissions can be of importance. An example is the deletion, in King Lear, of Edmund’s failed attempt to withdraw his order to have Lear and Cordelia executed; it made B’s Edmund more cruel than Shakespeare’s. Changes could concern the dramatis personae. Characters were sometimes added: Klara in Miss Julie, Thalatta in The Bacchae. They could appear in new guises. In King Lear Shakespeare’s Gentleman became a Scribe, his Officer a Physician. In The Bacchae Euripides’ First Messenger became a Sheperd. Changes could concern the dialogue. In Ghosts about thirty percent of the play was rewritten. In A Dolls House some additions served to support Helmer, the representative male. A problematic change in The

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Misanthrope concerned Alceste’s poem which was replaced by a very different kind of poem by Silesius. An unusual part of B’s direction concerned the fact that the theatre building itself could play an important part in the productions. In A Doll’s House and Ghosts the scenery revealed that both plays were set in about the same period as the art nouveau building where they were staged; the audience found itself, as it were, in the same surroundings as the characters. This experience was even more apparent in The Winter’s Tale, where the scenery in the latter part of the performance was a replica of Dramaten’s foyer. Ever since the 1950s, B was in favour of an empty or nearly empty stage. One reason for this was that he found “every stagehand […], every use of the curtain, every raising and lowering of settings disturbing moments” (Sjögren, 1968: 311f.). Another reason was indicated in his description of his third Ghost Sonata production: “We have few properties, very few things, nothing that can distract from the faces. The important thing is what happens to the bodies” (Törnqvist, 2000: 178). In Madame de Sade an almost empty, aristocratic, pre-revolutionary stage in the beginning contrasted with a crammed post-revolutionary stage at the end. In A Doll’s House the huge vertical space reduced the characters to puppets. In Long Day’s Journey imaginary walls surrounded the highly stylised Tyrone drawing room. Lear‘s reference to the world as “this stage of fools” was spatially indicated in B’s King Lear by the colour and shape of the stage which corresponded to the red horse-shoe form of the auditorium; the director hereby created a theatrum mundi connecting characters and audience. In the opening of Hamlet the globe of this earth was literally inscribed in the circle on the stage outside which the Ghost communicated with his son Hamlet inside it; their handshakeing took place on the very border line. In Ghosts a link between characters and audience was established when Mrs Alving’s orphanage was placed in the auditorium forcing the characaters to face the audience straight-on. Even more emphatic was the link between stage and auditorium in Peer Gynt where not only Peer but also the audience throughout the play found themselves literally within the walls of mother Aase’s cottage. Connections between the two theatrical areas could also be established by having the characters appear in the auditorium. In The Bacchae the Chorus entered the stage from the auditorium – as did Dionysus at the end. In The Ghost Sonata the Student, similarly, crept – was ‘born’ – onto the stage from the auditorium. At the end of A Doll’s House Nora indicated

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her representativity by leaving her home for the outside world through the auditorium. B is renowned for his sensitive and imaginative lighting on screen and stage. And surely, the lighting often contributed strongly to the suggestiveness of the productions. Of primary importance was the strong frontal lighting which testified to B’s concern with the human face, his wish to make the stage faces approach the intimacy of cinema faces and enable the audience to experience the mimicry of the characters at important moments. Spot-lights were used effectively to surround Hamlet groping in darkness in the early Ghost scene, and a spectacular spot in Mary Stuart showed Leicester’s ‘decapitated’ head when he was looking down through the floor opening at the beheading of Mary. Blinding bluish light directed toward the audience was seen at the end of Hamlet. A blinding white light – the evil heritage of de Sade pointing forward to the Hiroshima bomb – turned Renée’s upturned head white at the end of Madame de Sade. Dionysus’ revenge at the end of The Bacchae took the form of a clap of thunder and strong white light on the stage from behind the auditorium; the calamity was universal, shared by characters and audience alike. Music is usually used much more sparsely on the stage than on the screen. Even so, music came to play an increasing role in B’s stage productions. In accordance with Strindberg’s own idea, A Dream Play was filled with music, although it mostly differed from the author’s preferences. The performance opened with a single piano note, in C major and petered out at the end on the same desolate note; beginning and end – a whole lifetime – was musically embraced. The overture of Léhar’s The Merry Widow ironically opened Hamlet and the performance ended with drum beats recalling the opening of Beethoven’s Destiny Symphony. The romantic “Maiden’s Prayer,” accompanying Nora’s fairy-tale reading to her daughter in the opening of A Doll’s House, provided an ironic contrast to the illusion-shattering ending. In Mary Stuart soft music as “from paradise” accompanied Mortimer’s exalted description of Catholic culture, and a female voice singing what was presumably a Scottish folksong in combination with projected drifting clouds expressed Mary’s longing for freedom from her English imprisonment. The flute and drums accompanying the Chorus in The Bacchae not only linked the production to what we imagine to be the ancient Greek way of performance; more importantly they set the Dionysus worshippers off from the ‘Apollonian’ Pentheus. When Dionysus appeared as prisoner before Pentheus, the Roman’s attraction to the god-in-human-shape was accompanied by soft music, indicative of the suppressed tenderness within

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Pentheus. Japanese koto music, indicative of the affinity with no drama, played a part in Madame de Sade. Music by Martinu was heard in Peer Gynt, by Bartók in The Ghost Sonata. The Winter’s Tale was interspersed with a capella singing of some of Almqvist’s Songes, the texts of which formed an integral thematic part of the production. The usually fairly empty three-dimensional stage was sometimes complemented by two-dimensional back projections. In A Doll’s House their big size served to diminish the characters, turn them into puppets. The projected properties also served as static flashbacks, notably at the end when the returning of the rings took place in front of a projected setting recalling the altar where the marriage that was now annulled had once been contracted. Helmer’s and Nora’s whole marriage was spatially visualised in the split scenery. In Long Day’s Journey the projections were used incidentally showing first the outside of the house where the action took place floating in the air – a dreamy note; then through various, sometimes out-of-focus, interiors; and finally a strongly lit (family) tree – a directorial invention – the branches of which suggested the complicated relations of the four Tyrones. In The Ghost Sonata the projected huge imaginary hyacinths in bloom strikingly contrasted with the small real ones withering in the Young Lady’s window box. In Ghosts two projections of Captain Alving at the peak of his life was nostalgically contrasted with his later decline revealed in the dialogue. All the projections could be seen as a cinematic way of transcending the limitation of theatre in order to enter the souls of the characters. B sometimes provided his stage performances with a self-invented play-before-the-play. As more or less wordless sequences in which visual impressions dominated, these playlets were similar to tableaux vivants. In King Lear a twelve-minute prelude consisted of courtly dances before the King, followed by wild folk dances as soon as he had disappeared, demonstrating the social gap in Lear’s realm. In Maria Stuart the two queens/ cousins, Mary and Elizabeth, appeared side by side in the first moments of the play, as if they were equals – until Mary changed from royal red to black and moved to the far left, foreshadowing her imprisonment. In The Misanthrope the game of Blind Man’s Buff anticipated the rivalry between Alceste and Oronte and helped characterise Célimène. In Long Day’s Journey the four family members formed a circle when the play opened, presenting a wished-for harmonious unity that the play later questioned. In A Doll’s House Ibsen’s opening with the arrival of the (symbolic) Christmas tree was replaced by Nora’s reading a good-night fairy-tale to her daughter Hilde, a fairy-tale starkly contrasting with Hilde’s experience of reality at the end of the play, when she witnessed the divorce of her parents. Ghosts opened

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with an emblematic picture of Mrs Alving center-stage frontally looking at the audience. Her black dress, suggesting mourning, indicated that this prologue to the play was actually an epilogue and that the play the audience were to witness had actually taken place in Mrs Alving’s mind. An added epilogue formed the end of Miss Julie when Jean, back in his role as servant, poured coffee from the copper kettle into the silver pot and carried it off to the Count. More enigmatic was the epilogue in Long Day’s Journey, where B had Edmund re-enter and pick up his black notebook in front of the projected radiant family tree. Did it visualise his entanglement in the family or his – the burgeoning playwright’s – liberation from it? In the course of the various productions there were incidentally situations that were so pregnant with meaning that they could be called emblematic. The mirror sequence at the end of Miss Julie was such a situation, the bridal gown sequence concluding Long Day’s Journey was another. It was no coincidence that these sequences appeared toward the end of the performances. Not until the audience had been emotionally involved in the destinies of the characters would such emblematic sequences be in-depth engaging. Characters may appear either as individuals or as group members. To indicate their category the court members in King Lear, Hamlet, and The Winter’s Tale were anonymous and dressed in the same way. But the beggars in King Lear, the peasants in Miss Julie, the wedding guests at Hægstad in Peer Gynt, and the Chorus members in The Bacchae, unlike their anonymous textual counterparts, all had invidual names and characteristics. The difference indicated that the subservience of the court members had led to self-effacement whereas the common people had retained their individuality. In Peer Gynt some guests at Hægstad had the same names as some of the Dovre trolls, a way of stressing and enriching the play’s fundamental troll-in-man theme. In The Ghost Sonata the characters had individual appearances; yet all of them, except the Student, shared some sort of physical defect; taken together it made them a collective representative of the sickness of humanity. A significant directorial device is to make certain characters correspond to each other, sometimes to heighten the contrast between them, as was the case with regard to the correspondence between Julie and Kristin in Miss Julie. The correspondence between Mrs Alving and Regine in Ghosts, on the other hand, suggested a fateful parallel between the two, the former seeing the latter as mirroring her past young self. In Peer Gynt mother Aase and Solveig became parallel figures in their all-embracing love for Peer; when Peer hid his face in Solveig’s lap at the end, he was virtually returning to the maternal womb. The correspondence between Lear and the Fool, suggested

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already in the text, was indicated visually when the Fool put his cap on Lear’s head – as Hamlet put his cap on the skull of Yorick, the court jester of his childhood. The doubling of characters may suggest correspondences. When B, in Hamlet, had the same actor play the Ghost and the First Player the suggestion seemed to be that to Hamlet one was as real and as cherished as the other. Indications that a character connotes Everyman and as such is a thankful identification object can be indicated in his or her neutral costume, similar to what could be found in the audience. Hamlet and the Student in The Ghost Sonata could be seen in this way. A purely allegorical character was Time in The Winter’s Tale, an elderly woman with a huge alarm clock. The gender of the characters can be problematised. Dionysus, the male god in The Bacchae who is both terrifying and mild, ‘male’ and ‘female,’ revealed his androgynous nature in B’s production by being played by an actress. Similarly, Mamillius, a boy of ten in The Winter’s Tale, was played by a girl; as an ‘androgynous’ character he/she was a representative child. Unlike all the other women in Madame de Sade, Saint-Fond was dressed like a man in riding costume and provided with a riding weal. A defender of the values of marquis de Sade she seemed almost a substitute for the physically off-stage but mentally very on-stage marquis. As appears from his detailed drawings in the prompt books, B paid minute attention to the characters’ blocking. Frontal position downstage could mean alienation from the central acting area and direct communication with the audience, as sometimes in the case of Alceste in The Misanthrope. A similar strong position, in this case breaking with the illusion of the fourth wall, was given to Mary Tyrone, when she was soliloquising at the end of Long Day’s Journey. In Miss Julie Julie’s frontal position when the greenfich was slaughtered behind her enabled the audience to focus on her reaction to the killing rather than on the killing itself. Quite telling, in Hamlet, was how the Councilors, ‘directed’ by Polonius, alternately turned to and away from Claudius, a kind of kinetic censorship. Alternating proximity and distance mirroring alternating mental attitudes characterised the blocking of Madame de Sade; in the opening of the play, for example, the immobility of Simiane contrasted with the restless to-and-fro of Saint-Fond. Similarly, the immobility of Philinte in the beginning of The Misanthrope contrasted with the restless mobility of Alceste. Early in Mary Stuart a row of upright soldiers in grey uniforms did not become visible until Elizabeth’s red-dressed Councilors in front of them knelt down, an indication of how diplomacy precedes – and disguises – violence.

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Gestures were of course often characterising. In The Misanthrope Alceste’s frequently crossed arms were at once a dominant, Napoleonic and a self-embracing, isolating gesture. Characters crossing themselves in a Christian way would appear in several productions. At the end of The Ghost Sonata the Milkmaid placed herself in the painful position of Christ on the cross and at the end of Mary Stuart Mary spread her arms out in cross-form. Both of them in this way demonstrated their satisfactio vicaria. The positions of the characters were important not least in intimate relationships. Hamlet opened with Claudius and Gertrud rolling across the stage and copulating a tergo, animal fashion, more or less publicly, an immediate expression of the corruption at the Danish court. Hamlet later, taunting the manners at the court, mock-raped Ophelia. Goneril in King Lear used her dress as a mask when she had her servant Oswald, in low position, creep under it and suck her intimates. In Mary Stuart, similarly, Elisabeth seduced Mortimer by spreading out her dress and hierarchically sitting on him for a moment of sexual satisfaction. At the end of the play she significantly loosened her hair and touched her abdomen when expecting her lover Leicester to arrive. Jean’s putting a lilac to Julie’s mouth in Miss Julie was a gesture inviting coitus. In A Doll’s House Helmer’s treating Nora to money was followed by her spreading her legs inviting him to penetrate her, an emblematic sequence demonstrating sex as trade within the marriage and indirectly questioning the difference between marriage and prostitution. More or less publicly, sex – both hetero and homo – was traded between upper and lower classes, in The Misanthrope between marquis Acaste and servant Dorine and marquis Clitandre and servant Basque. In The Bacchae Pentheus’ coitus position above Dionysus revealed his attraction despite himself to the god-in-disguise. In The Ghost Sonata the Milkmaid’s pregnancy – a directorial addition – indicated that she had been raped by the Old Man – which motivated her role as his hang(wo)man. Even such a seemingly innocent gesture as Mrs Alving kissing Manders in Ghosts had wide repercussions since it repeated the fateful kiss in the past leading to his break with the Alving family. B at times chose to freeze the movements of the characters, a device intermittently resorted to in The Winter’s Tale. The instant stasis that was hereby effectuated punctuated the fluidity of the performance and activated the audience while at the same time detaching it from it, since the artificiality of the freezing made the spectators more aware that they were witnessing a performance. When Elizabeth toward the end of Mary Stuart stood completely still in the background for a long time, her right hand raised against the right wall, her passivity concerning the fate of Mary

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was signalled. At the end of The Ghost Sonata the Colonel and the Mummy stood in frozen positions emphasising their isolation from each other and from the recently dead Young Lady. The sense of communion between stage and auditorium was further emphasised by having the characters sometimes form an on-stage audience mediating between the characters and the real audience. This was done most explicitly in A Doll’s House, where characters when off-stage sat down next to the platform where the acting took place; from there they remained fully visible and watched the on-stage performance. In The Winter’s Tale the guests at Hugo Löwenstierna’s party, sitting in the foremost row of the auditorium, watched the performance of the Shakespearean play-withinthe-play along with the real audience. When B in A Dream Play placed the Poet at his desk almost throughout the performance the indication was that he was the dreamer-narrator of the play. In some of the productions a character was at times isolated from the rest – Cordelia in King Lear, Ophelia in Hamlet, Edmund in Long Day’s Journey, Charlotte, the servant in Madame de Sade; the last-mentioned was a class-determined eavesdropper on the aristocracy foreshadowing the revolution to come. Incidentally allotted the role of observer, these characters were in this activity comparable to the real audience. Insofar as they appeared as internal ‘narrators,’ they lent a subjective angle to the performances. What was enacted on the stage seemed at once to represent reality and reality filtered through the mind of a character, a subjective approach. It was hardly a coincidence that the observers tended to be young. Remaining outside or at the periphery of the problematic world in which the main characters dwelled, they could be compared to children set off from the adults by virtue of their inexperience and innocence. Insofar as they served as reminders of the spectators’ own past, they had a universalising function. When, in Mary Stuart, Mary and Elisabeth were seen simultaneously on the stage, one in the foreground, the other in the background, one speaking, the other silent, the arrangement visualised the idea that the two were constantly on each other’s mind. Costumes, like props, are usually time indicators. In that capacity they may be stable, consistent as in Miss Julie, where they all mirror the fashion around 1890. Or they may be fluent as in The Winter’s Tale, where they stretch from the 17th to the 20th century, suggesting the fairy-talish universality of the action. B’s costumes, always selected and manufactured with great care, often played a contrasting role in the productions. Hamlet’s traditionally simple black costume set him off against the red costumes of Claudius’ court.

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Alceste’s equally simple dark-blue dress contrasted with the colourful, vain costumes of his rivals, Célimène’s admirers. And Peer Gynt’s black suit at the Hægstad wedding markedly differed from the red ‘folk costumes’ of the invited guests. Saint-Fond’s masculine riding habit and sleek hair radically contrasted with the elegant feminine costumes of the other women in Montreuil’s salon, hiding their bodies, and the voluminous wigs hiding their hair. In King Lear Edmund and Edgar were both in black but the material of their costumes differed. Indicating both their half-brotherhood and their moral polarity Edmund, the careerist, wore a shining dress, Edgar, the altruist, a lustreless one. The same could be true of hair fashion. In The Misanthrope Alceste’s sleek hair contrasted with his rival Oronte’s gigantic wig, a visualisation more of vain pomposity than upper-class. In The Bacchae Pentheus’ black fashioned sleek hair was very different from Dionysus’ natural curly blond hair. Similar costumes may designate affinity. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet were identically dressed, underlining that the two were always speaking with one voice. Horatio’s grey dress, although more fashionable and socially adjustable, was colourwise related to Hamlet’s black dress, indicating their closeness. In A Doll’s House Nora, Hilde, and Hilde’s doll were identically dressed, indicating the continuum from one generation to another. In The Winter’s Tale Mamillius’ loyalty to both parents was suggested in his costume, first blue like his father’s, then red like his mother’s. Costumes may indicate a split within the character, as when, in Long Day’s Journey, Tyrone’s elegant dressing-gown markedly contrasted with his old slippers. Or when, in The Ghost Sonata, the Mummy’s grey negligee was red below as if the blood of life was running out of her – the costume of a ‘ghost.’ Costumes may suggest inner cold, as when the Old Man in the same play appeared in fur cap and fur-edged coat although it was summer. Or when Anne appeared similarly dressed in the last act of Madame de Sade. Signif icant changes of costume may point to inner changes. Nora’s change of costume at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, arguably the most significant costume change in world drama, was naturally retained by B, although his choice of colour differed from Ibsen’s whose blue he replaced by mournful black. Leontes in The Winter’s Tale significantly changed from blue (credulous) to black (jealous) to white (penitent). When Renée at the end of Madame de Sade swept her shawl around her head she discreetly transformed it into a nun’s veil. As exponents of culture, costumes may be contrasted with nudity (nature). When both Ophelia and Mary Stuart appeared barefoot, it was an indication of their humility and childlike naturalness. When Osvald

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undressed at the end of Ghosts, it was a regressive gesture, returning him to the baby he once was and to his naked original state. With little scenery and few properties, the latter attract extra attention. The four chairs mid-stage in Long Day’s Journey related to the four family members while upstage the Greek column (hiding a liquor cabinet) formed an ideological contrast to the sculpture of Virgin Mary corresponing to the tension between Mary and her three men. In Ghosts the grandfather clock and the sculpture of the half-nude young woman were both time indicators relating to the generation motif in the play. On the bare stage of King Lear the royalties were sitting on human ‘chairs’ – a visual reification and a pregnant illustration of a suppressive class society. In Mary Stuart the spectators were asked to imagine that a simple wooden chair represented Queen Elizabeth’s throne. Books played a significant role in some of the performances. When Edmund in Long Day’s Journey told his father about his miraculous experiences at sea, he did so by reading aloud from his notebook; the burgeoning writer here came to the fore. Similarly, in The Ghost Sonata the Student’s romantic appraisal of the hyacinth was likewise read aloud from his notebook; rather than an impulsive outburst it was a writer’s contemplated way of expressing himself. In The Winter’s Tale a red guest book figured as incentive for Leontes’ jealousy; it had a kind of counterpart in the red shawl Hermione put around Leontes’ neck. In the opening of Ghosts Mrs Alving was seen reading a red book which apparently contained the provocative feminist statements (falsely) ascribed to Malene Diderichsen, a book whose pronounced feminism was later to shock Manders. In Madame de Sade the novel Justine was a kind of stand-in for its absent author. Fans played an important role in Madame de Sade and The Misanthrope. When open they were used to protect the owner, when closed they functioned as weapons. The fans in this way became illustrative of the fluctuation between defence and attack in the battles between the women. Less time-determined than fans, mirrors figured in several stage productions. When Jean held up a mirror to Julie at end of Miss Julie, the situation pregnantly visualised her imminent suicide. While Claudius in Hamlet compared his deeds to the ugly face of a prostitute disguised by a pretty mask, Gertrud, holding a hand-mirror in front of Ophelia, dramatised Claudius’ statement by turning the young girl’s face into that of a prostitute. Regine in Ghosts and Anne in Madame de Sade demonstrated their vanity by looking at themselves in imaginary mirrors. The many mirrors in The Misanthrope emphasised the narcissicism of the characters. Arsinoé in this play used her hand-mirror protectively; by looking at herself in it she at the same time

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avoided glances from her enemy Célimène. In Peer Gynt the narcissistic effect was arrived at when Peer in the Boyg scene was surrounded by a host of characters holding up hand-mirrors in front of him; the man who boasted to be no one but himself was confronted with a myriad of selves. A garment may function as a prop or change into a prop. The Count’s boots in Miss Julie, prominently placed downstage throughout the performance, became a metonymy for the Count himself. While B here followed Strindberg’s stage direction, the changing of Jean’s half-boot into an imaginary weal was his own suggestive way of turning a piece of costume into a tool of power. Like the boots in Miss Julie the crown in King Lear prominently figured on the forestage throughout the performance; a personal belonging had become an object of strife. When Nora in A Doll’s House blindfolded Rank with her black silk stockings, he came to share her erotically charged garment; at the same time the gesture was at this moment a hint at an imminent death that Nora came to believe they would share. Handkerchiefs can be considered part of costumes but may also be used as props. In Miss Julie Julie‘s perfume-scented but dirty handkerchief first functioned as an aphrodisiac, then as a weapon. In King Lear Emund’s hesitation between Regan and Goneril, was concretised in his hesitation between the handkerchief of the former and the miniature portrait of the latter; his dropping of the handkerchief settled the matter. Hamlet’s contrasting of his father with Claudius was accompanied by his looking at a miniature portrait of the former followed by a glance to the left where Claudius had just appeared. Ophelia wiped one of her eyes with a handkerchief when recalling how Hamlet’s penknife had pierced one of her father’s eyes; the choice of a penknife rather than a dagger indicated how the smallness of the murderous tool in Hamlet’s view fitted the mental size of its victim. When B had Ophelia offer nails with names of flowers rather than flowers to those closest to her, it was a sign not only of her madness but also of how she tried to console herself by embellishing the cruelty she had witnessed. Hilde’s doll in A Doll’s House was a significant prop, enabling a sense of continuum beyond the end of the play. In Mary Stuart Burleigh’s portfolio containing state documents emblematically bore witness of the dutiful civil servant; when he dropped it and tried to assemble the spread-out documents, he was reduced to a humble, crawling human being. A Dream Play ended with the characters’ returning their emblems to their creator, the Poet. The Bacchae ended with the Chorus reverently putting their thyrsus staffs on Semele’s altar-cum-grave, humbly recognising the cruel power of Dionysus.

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Cultural signifiers, demanding specific knowledge on the part of the audience, played a role in several of the productions. Thus familiarity with Mary Stuart’s behaviour shortly before she was executed helped to explain her behaviour toward the end of B’s production. Many signifiers referred to Swedish circumstances, familiar to the Stockholm audience but not to the foreign spectators witnessing the productions when they went on tour. To the Swedes both the birch branches decorating the kitchen in Miss Julie and the garland of wild flowers on Kristin’s head were obvious tokens of Midsummer – as were the garlands worn by the dancers in the Fairhaven Scene of A Dream Play as well as those worn by the characters in the part of The Winter’s Tale, where Shakespeare’s sheepshearing feast gave way to a Swedish Midsummer celebration. Even Lear’s wreath of wild flowers could have this connotation next to the Christian one of a crown of thorns. The spectators who had enoyed higher education – and they would be in the majority – would realise that the degree ceremony in A Dream Play owed much to the way in which this academic ritual is performed in Sweden. Much less known it would be that the belt-wrestling at the end of King Lear relied on an old Scandinavian, possibly mythical tradition. Some of the references were cryptic even to most of the Swedish spectators. Some of them would see a similarity between Aase’s hair fashion in Peer Gynt and that of Sara Lidman, one of the foremost Swedish writers at the time. Quite a few would grasp that B’s change of the number of scholars in the Cairo asylum from seventy to eighteen was a dig at the eighteen members of the Swedish Academy. Those who had looked at the cast in the theatre program might realise that the house projected in the opening of The Ghost Sonata was a replica of the so-called Red House at Karlaplan in Stockholm where Strindberg, the author of the play, lived when writing it; but few would know that the house was later replaced by another one where B himself came to live and that it in this way became connected not only with the writer but also, indirectly, with the director of the play. A few critics noted that B’s Hamlet was not unlike B as an angry young man and the choice of Peter Stormare for the role emphasised this by having Hamlet wear the same kind of cap as the young director. Alving in Ghosts lacks a Christian name; when B gave him the name of his own father, Erik, it was a hint to the insiders that the Alving family was not far removed from B’s own parental family. When he had Manders quote, not a female author as it says in the performance, but actually Ibsen himself, the irony was so cryptic that only those familiar with Ibsen’s notes for Ghosts would recognise the quotation and grasp the hidden irony.

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Having surveyed the variety of B’s devices as a stage director, let me conclude with his overall view of his work in the theatre. “Whatever we play,” he told Sjögren in 1968 (294), “it remains a game in which, with a minute share on our own part, we give shape to life and death, joy and sorrow, happiness and pain and whatever else. And it seems to me terribly important that you take this game completely seriously and that you are all the time aware that it is a game and don’t imagine that it is anything else.” More than thirty years later he told Sjögren (2002: 112): “You mustn’t forget that I am a playful person. I have played all my life. […] The need to play is deep inside us all. Marquis de Sade played in his way, with peculiar toys. My game began more modestly with puppetry, that was the starting point. Nowadays the game is about life and death.”1 The qualification “a playful person” (en lekande människa) recalls the Swedish title of Johan Huizinga’s pioneering book Homo ludens (1938). Huizinga’s view that man’s activities are fundamentally playful by no means excludes seriousness. Irrespective of whether B ever read Huizinga’s book or not, the central view in it agrees with his idea that his activity in the theatre is an expression of playfulness. A serious game – in this seemingly contradictory but deeply meaningful collocation we find the essential key to B as a stage director.

1 The English verb ‘play’ in Swedish corresponds both to leka (what children do) and to spela (what actors do). Similarly the English noun ‘game’ in Swedish corresponds both to lek and spel.



Production Data

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR (c. 1608) Credits Swedish Title Translation Stage & Costume Design Choreography Music Lighting Running Time Stage Recorded Opening Date

Kung Lear Britt G. Hallqvist Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss Donya Feuer Daniel Bell Lars Johnsson 3:30 plus 1 intermission Big Stage September 6, 1985 March 9, 1984 (176 performances)

Cast King Lear Goneril Regan Cordelia The Fool Kent Gloucester Edgar Edmund Albany Cornwall Oswald Burgundy Frankland Old Man Officer Servant Scribe Doctor Messenger

Jarl Kulle Margaretha Byström Ewa Fröhling/Gerthi Kulle Lena Olin Jan-Olof Strandberg Börje Ahlstedt Per Myrberg Mathias Henrikson Thomas Pontén Per Mattsson Peter Stormare/Peter Andersson Olof Lundström Lakke Magnusson Peter Andersson/Johan Lindell Oscar Ljung Hans Strååt Birger Malmsten Rolf Skoglund Frank Sundström Gudmar Wivesson

238 

The Serious Game

Herald Jan Nyman/Hans Strååt Captain Dennis Dahlsten Fencing Master Pierre Wilkner Goneril’s court, Regan’s court, Servants, Jugglers, Soldiers

AUGUST STRINDBERG, MISS JULIE (1888) Credits Swedish Title Stage & Costume Design Lighting Running Time Stage Recorded Opening Date

Fröken Julie Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss Hans Åkesson 2:00 Small Stage December 3, 1985 December 7, 1985 (167 + 9 performances)

Cast Miss Julie Jean Kristin Farmhands and servants

Marie Göranzon Peter Stormare Gerthi Kulle Eva Callenbo, Anna von Rosen, Paula Ternström, Peter Blomberg, Måns Edwall, Lars-Erik Johansson

AUGUST STRINDBERG, A DREAM PLAY (1902) Credits Swedish Title Stage & Costume Design Coreography Music Lighting Running Time Stage

Ett drömspel Marik Vos Mait Angberg Daniel Bell Hans Åkesson 2:15 Small Stage

239

Produc tion Data

Recorded Opening Date

April 22, 1986 April 25, 1986 (34 performances)

Cast The Poet The Glazier Agnes The Officer The Mother The Father Lina, servant The Doorkeeper The Billboarder The Singer The Prompter The Policeman The Lawyer Kristin The Quarantine Master Don Juan The Coquette He She Lina at Foulstrand The Retiree The Friend Edith Edith’s Mother A Naval Officer Alice The Husband The Wife The Blind Man The Teacher Two Coalcarriers The Newly Wed The Lord Chancellor Dean of Theology

Mathias Henrikson Oscar Ljung Ellen Lamm, Linn Oké/Lena Olin/ Birgitta Valberg Stellan Skarsgård Irene Lindh Gösta Prüzelius Ingrid Boström Kristina Adolphson Hans Strååt Kicki Bramberg Dennis Dahlsten Carl Billquist Per Myrberg Gerd Hagman Ingvar Kjellson Johan Lindell Dora Söderberg Pierre Wilkner Pernilla Östergren Kicki Bramberg Oscar Ljung Dennis Dahlsten Marianne Karlbeck Gerd Hagman Mikael Säflund Louise Amble Carl Billquist Gertrud Mariano Frank Sundström Åke Lagergren Olof Willgren, Jan Waldekranz Pernilla Östergren, Pierre Wilkner Carl Billquist Gösta Prüzelius

240 

Dean of Philosophy Dean of Medicine Dean of Law

The Serious Game

Claes Thelander Per Sjöstrand Åke Lagergren

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET (c. 1601) Credits Swedish Title Translation Stage & Costume Design Choreography Music Lighting Running Time Stage Recorded Opening Date

Hamlet Britt G. Hallqvist Göran Wassberg Mercedes Björlin Jean Billgren Hans Åkesson 3:45 Big Stage December 16, 1986 December 20, 1986 (87 performances)

Cast Claudius Hamlet The Ghost Gertrude Polonius Laertes Ophelia Horatio Rosencrantz Guildenstern Bernardo Marcellus Francisco Osric Court Lady A Priest Gravedigger Fortinbras

Börje Ahlstedt Peter Stormare Per Myrberg Gunnel Lindblom Ulf Johanson Pierre Wilkner Pernilla Östergren Jan Waldekranz Johan Lindell Johan Rabæus Joakim Westerberg Johan Rabæus Dennis Dahlsten Johan Lindell Marie Richardson Oscar Ljung Ulf Johanson Joakim Westerberg

241

Produc tion Data

Theatre King Theatre Queen Lucianus Pelageia Flutist Drummer A Captain

Per Myrberg Marie Richardson Oscar Ljung Gerd Hagman Ivan Ossoinak Michael Vinsa Dennis Dahlsten

EUGENE O’NEILL, LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1941) Credits Swedish Title Translation Stage & Costume Design Music Lighting Sound Projections Running Time Stage Recorded Opening Date

Lång dags färd mot natt Sven Barthel, Karl Ragnar Gierow Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss Daniel Bell Hans Åkesson Jan-Erik Piper Bengt Wanselius 3:05 plus 1 intermission Main Stage April 12, 1988 April 16, 1988 (129 performances)

Cast James Tyrone Mary Cavan Tyrone Jim Tyrone Edmund Tyrone Cathleen

Jarl Kulle Bibi Andersson Thommy Berggren Peter Stormare Kicki Bramberg

YUKIO MISHIMA, MADAME DE SADE (1965) Credits Japanese Title Swedish Title

Sado Kôshaku Fujin Markisinnan de Sade

242 

Translation Stage & Costume Design Choreography Music Lighting Running Time Stage Recorded Opening date

The Serious Game

Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, Per Erik Wahlund Charles Koroly Donya Feuer Ingrid Yoda Sven-Erik Jacobson 2:45 incl. 2 intermissions Small Stage May 4, 1989 April 8, 1989 (162 performances)

Cast Renée, the Marquise de Sade Madame de Montreuil, her mother Anne, Renée’s younger sister Baroness de Simiane Countess de Saint-Fond Charlotte, housekeeper

Stina Ekblad Anita Björk Marie Richardson Margaretha Byström Agneta Ekmanner Helena Brodin

HENRIK IBSEN, A DOLL’S HOUSE (1879) Credits Norwegian Title Swedish Title Translation Stage & Costume Design Choreography Music Lighting Running Time Stage Recorded Opening Date

Et Dukkehjem Ett dockhem Klas Östergren Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss Donya Feuer Daniel Bell Hans Åkesson 2:25 incl. 1 intermission Main Stage November 13, 1989 November 17, 1989 (105 performances)

243

Produc tion Data

Cast Torvald Helmer Nora, his wife Hilde, their daughter Doctor Rank Mrs. Linde Krogstad

Per Mattsson Pernilla Östergren Mirja Modén/Elin Ekman/Hanna Ahlström/Erika Harrysson Erland Josephson Marie Richardson Björn Granath

HENRIK IBSEN, PEER GYNT (1867) Credits Norwegian Title Swedish Title Translation Stage & Costume Design Choreography Music Lighting Sound Running Time Stage Recorded Opening Date

Peer Gynt Peer Gynt Lars Forssell Lennart Mörk Donya Feuer Bohuslav Martinu Hans Åkesson Jan-Erik Piper 2:30 plus 2 intermissions Paint Room, later moved to Big Stage April 23, 1991 April 27, 1991 (130 performances)

Cast First Part: Tales and Dreams Åse Peer Gynt Aslak, smith Ole, rabblerouser Finn, rabblerouser Hægstad Farmer The Bridegroom His Mother His Father

Bibi Andersson Börje Ahlstedt Carl Magnus Dellow Anders Ekborg Jakob Eklund Oscar Ljung Per Mattsson Gerthi Kulle Jan Waldekranz

244 

The Bride Ingrid Synnöve Hilde Nora Ingert Solveig Her Father Her Mother Her Sister Helga Other Guests at the Wedding

Summer Dairy Girls The Woman in Green The Dovre Troll King His Son Ole His Son Finn His Son Odd His Son Egil His Daughter Synnöve His Daughter Hilde His Wife Greatgrandmother Greatgrandfather Vaidur Troll Kid The Boyg

Kari

The Serious Game

Maria Ericson Görel Crona Gunnel Fred Kicki Bramberg Anna Björk Lena Endre Tord Peterson Agneta Ehrensvärd Maja-Lena Holmberg/Rebecca Ebbersten/Linda Resén/Emilie Åkerlund Therese Andersson, Marie Bergenholtz, Jesper Eriksson, Ulf Evrén, Jukka Korpi, Sara Larsson, Pia Mucchiano, Pahkinen, Erik Winqvist, Thomas Wrisemo Maria Ericson, Solveig Ternstræm, Kristina Adolphson, Kicki Bramberg Gerthi Kulle Johan Rabæus Anders Ekborg Jakob Eklund Benny Haag Thomas Hanzon Görel Crona Gunnel Fred Kicki Bramberg Agneta Ehrensvärd Pierre Wilkner Anna Björk Maria Ericson, Carl Magnus Dellow, Anders Ekborg, Jakob Eklund, Benny Haag, Thomas Hanzon, Gunnel Fred, Ulf Evrén, Jukka Korpi, Jesper Eriksson, Erik Winqvist, Sara Larsson, Therese Andersson, Pia Muchiano, Marie Bergenholtz Kristina Adolphson

245

Produc tion Data

Second Part: Foreign Lands Peer Gynt Trumpeterstråhle Master Cotton Monsieur Ballon Von Eberkopf Anitra Asra Basra Begriffenfeldt Apis The Pen Third Part: The Homecoming Peer Gynt The Captain The Strange Passenger The Cook Aslak The Bridegroom Finn Ole Odd Egil Synnöve Hilde Nora Ingert People at the Auction The Sheriff The Thoughts The Songs The Tears Åse The Button-molder The Dovre Troll Solveig

Börje Ahlstedt Jan Waldekranz Björn Granath Agneta Ehrensvärd Pierre Wilkner Solveig Ternström Gunnel Fred Kicki Bramberg Johan Rabæus Maria Ericson Per Mattsson Börje Ahlstedt Tord Peterson Björn Granath Jakob Eklund Carl Magnus Dellow Per Mattsson Görel Crona Gunnel Fred Kicki Bramberg Anna Björk Benny Haag Jakob Eklund Anders Ekborg Thomas Hanzon Marie Bergenholtz, Jukka Korpi, Sara Larsson, Virpi Pahkinen Oscar Ljung Gerthi Kulle Solveig Ternström Kristina Adolphson Bibi Andersson Jan-Olof Strandberg Johan Rabæus Lena Endre

246 

The Serious Game

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE WINTER’S TALE (ca. 1610) Credits Swedish Title Translation Stage & Costume Design Choreography Music Lighting Running time Stage Recorded Opening Date

Vintersagan Britt G. Hallqvist, Claes Schaar Lennart Mörk Donya Feuer Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, Jean Billgren Hans Åkesson 2:55 incl. 1 intermission Big Stage May 11, 1994 April 9, 1994

Cast The female singer The male singer Leontes, king on Sicily Hermione, his wife Mamillius, their son, 10 years Perdita, their daughter Polixenes, king of Bohemia Florizel, his son Camillo, Sicilian nobleman Antigonus, Sicilian nobleman Cleomenes, Sicilian nobleman Dion, Sicilian nobleman Paulina, Antigonus’wife Emilia, Hermione’s lady in waiting Amalia, Hermione’s lady in waiting Archidamus, Bohemian nobleman Judge Gerontes Shepherd Clown, his son Autolycus, petty swindler Mopsa, shepherdess

Irene Lindh Pierre Wilkner Börje Ahlstedt Pernilla August Anna Björk Kristina Törnqvist Krister Henriksson Jakob Eklund Gösta Prüzelius Ingvar Kjellson Jan Blomberg Pierre Wilkner Bibi Andersson Monica Nielsen Thérèse Brunnander Oscar Ljung John Zacharias Gerd Hagman Tord Peterson Per Mattsson Reine Brynolfsson Thérèse Brunnander

247

Produc tion Data

Dorcas, shepherdess Sailor Prison guard Abbess Old courtier Time, as chorus

Monica Nielsen Jan Nyman Oscar Ljung Gerd Hagman Ingvar Kjellson Kristina Adolphson

J.B.P. MOLIÈRE, THE MISANTHROPE (1666) Credits French Title Swedish Title Translation Stage & Costume Design Choreography Music Lighting Running Time Stage Recorded Opening Date

Le Misanthrope Misantropen Hans Alfredson Charles Koroly Donya Feuer Jean Billgren, Domenico Scarlatti Hans Åkesson 2:30 incl. 1 intermission Big Stage March 2, 1995 February 17, 1995 (117 performances)

Cast Alceste Célimène Philinte Oronte Éliante Arsinoé Acaste Clitandre Du Bois, Alceste’s servant Basque, Célimène’s servant Dorine An orderly Two servants

Torsten Flinck Lena Endre Thomas Hanzon Jarl Kulle Nadja Weiss Agneta Ekmanner Mats Bergman Claes Månsson Sven Lindberg Benny Haag Ingar Sigvardsdotter Fredrik Hammar Lars Andersson, Richard Gustavsson

248 

The Serious Game

EURIPIDES, THE BACCHAE (405 B.C.) Credits Greek Title Swedish Title Translation Stage & Costume Design Choreography Music Musicians Lighting Running Time Stage Recorded Opening Date

Βάκχαι, Bakchai Backanterna Göran O. Eriksson, Jan Stolpe Göran Wassberg Donya Feuer Daniel Börtz Jan Bengtsson (flute), Kenneth Fant, Daniel Kåse (drums) Pierre Leveau 1:35 plus 1 intermission Paint Room March 12, 1996 March 15, 1996 (84 performances)

Cast Dionysos Pentheus Cadmos Agave Tiresias The Messenger The Guard The Companion The Officer Soldiers

Elin Klinga Gerhard Hoberstorfer Erland Josephson Gunnel Lindblom Ingvar Kjellson Per Myrberg Roland Jansson Kicki Bramberg Richard Gustafsson Lars Andersson, Max Winerdal

The Chorus Alfa, leader of the chorus Gamma Zeta Lambda Xi Sigma Omega Thalatta

Anita Björk Helena Brodin Gunnel Fred Kristina Törnqvist Gerthi Kulle Inga-Lill Andersson Lil Terselius Donya Feuer

249

Produc tion Data

AUGUST STRINDBERG, THE GHOST SONATA (1907) Credits Swedish Title Stage Design Costumes Choreography Music Lighting Running Time Stage Recorded Opening Date

Spöksonaten Göran Wassberg Anna Bergman Virpi Pahkinen Béla Bartók Pierre Leveau 1:30 Paint Room February 2, 2000 February 12, 2000 (119 performances)

Cast The Old Man The Young Lady The Student The Milkmaid The Concierge The Dead Consul The Dark Lady The Mummy Bengtsson Johansson The Fiancée The Cook

Jan Malmsjö Elin Klinga Jonas Malmsjö Virpi Pahkinen Gertrud Mariano Nils Eklund Gerthi Kulle Gunnel Lindblom Erland Josephson Örjan Ramberg Margreth Weivers-Norström Gerd Hagman

FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER, MARY STUART (1800) Credits German Title Swedish Title Translation Stage Design Costumes

Maria Stuart Maria Stuart Britt G. Hallqvist Göran Wassberg Charles Koroly

250 

Choreography Music Lighting Running Time Stage Recorded Opening Date

The Serious Game

Donya Feuer Daniel Börtz Hans Åkesson 2:10 plus 1 intermission Big Stage December 12, 2000 December 16, 2000 (57 performances)

Cast Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland Elizabeth, queen of England Hannah Kennedy, Mary’s wetnurse Margareth Kurl, lady in waiting Burgoyn, doctor/de Verdières Lord Leicester Lord Burleigh Lord Talbot Davison, secretary Lord Paulet Drury Mortimer, Paulet’s nephew Aubespin, French ambassador Melvil, Mary’s steward Okelly/de Larzac Commander Officer/de Canisy Prison guard Ladies at court, Soldiers

Pernilla August Lena Endre Gunnel Lindblom Charlotta Larsson Tord Peterson Mikael Persbrandt Börje Ahlstedt Per Myrberg Carl-Magnus Dellow Ingvar Kjellson Ulf Strandberg Stefan Larsson Nils Eklund Erland Josephson Pierre Wikner Jan Nyman Albin Holmberg Yngve Erik Lundin

HENRIK IBSEN, GHOSTS (1880) Credits Swedish Title Translation/Adaptation Stage Design Costumes Choreography

Gengångare Ingmar Bergman Göran Wassberg Anna Bergman Donya Feuer

251

Produc tion Data

Music Lighting Sound Running Time Stage Recorded Opening Date

Arvo Pärt Pierre Leveau Jan-Erik Piper 2:15 plus 1 intermission Main Stage February 9, 2002 February 9, 2002 (? performances)

Cast Mrs. Helene Alving Osvald Alving, her son Jacob Engstrand, carpenter Pastor Manders Regine Engstrand

Pernilla August Jonas Malmsjö Örjan Ramberg Jan Malmsjö Angela Kovács

Bibliography UNPUBLISHED SOURCES The Royal Dramatic Theatre (Library) Translation Schiller, Friedrich von, Maria Stuart: Sorgespel i fem akter. 235 p. Övers. Britt G. Hallqvist. Prompt scripts Ibsen, Henrik, Peer Gynt Schiller, Friedrich von, Maria Stuart Shakespeare, William, Hamlet Euripides, Backanterna Ibsen, Henrik, Ett dockhem Shakespeare, William, Kung Lear Strindberg, August, Spöksonaten Ibsen, Henrik, Gengångare Production scripts Euripides, Backanterna. 22 March 1996. 67 p. Schiller, Friedrich von, Maria Stuart. 26 Dec. 2000.104 p. Shakespeare, William, Vintersagan. 19 May 1994. 97 p. Shakespeare, William, Hamlet. 16 Sep. 1986. 153 p. O’Neill, Eugene, Lång dags färd mot natt. 19 March 1987. 110 p. Strindberg, August, Fröken Julie. 22 Sep. 1985. 87 p. Strindberg, August, Ett drömspel. 11 Jan. 1986. 108 p. Ibsen, Henrik. Ett dockhem. 11 June 1989, revised 3 Nov. 1989. 131 p. Ibsen, Henrik, Peer Gynt. 2 Feb. 1991.187 p. Shakespeare, William, Kung Lear. 2 Oct. 1983.148 p. Molière, Jean-Baptiste, Misantropen. 2 March 1995.109 p. Strindberg, August, Spöksonaten. 12 Feb. 2000.79 p. Ibsen, Henrik, Gengångare. 7 June 2001, revised 14 Feb. 2002.112 p. Mishima, Yukio, Markisinnan de Sade. 8 April 1989. 118 p.

Ingmar Bergman Foundation Director’s prompt scripts O’Neill, Eugene, Lång dags färd mot natt Strindberg, August. Ett drömspel Molière, Jean-Baptiste, Misantropen Mishimia, Yukio, Markisinnan de Sade

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PUBLISHED SOURCES Aarseth, Asbjørn. 1975. Dyret i Mennesket: Et bidrag til tolkning av Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Bergen/Oslo/Tromsø. Artaud, Antonin. (1938) 1958. The Theater and Its Double. Tr. Mary Caroline Richards. New York. Bark, Richard. 1981. Strindbergs drömspelsteknik – i drama och teater. Lund. Beck, Ingamaj. 1994. Scenrummet och det imaginära. Dramat, 3. Bennich-Björkman, Bo. 1971. Fyrväpplingen och korset: Om symbolmeningen i Strindbergs Ett drömspel. In Gunilla and Staffan Bergsten, eds. Lyrik i tid och otid. Lyrikanalytiska studier tillägnade Gunnar Tideström. Lund. Bergman, Anna/Harning, Nils. 2008. Teaterns kläder: 100 år av dräkter på Dramaten. Stockholm. Bergman, Ingmar. 1972. Persona and Shame. Tr. Keith Bradfield. London/New York. ―. (1970)1993. Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman. Tr. Paul Britten Austin. New York. ―. (1987)1989. The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography. Tr. Joan Tate. Harmondsworth. ―. 1994a. När lägger du av, Ingmar? Anna Salander samtalar med Ingmar Bergman. Dramat, 3. ―. 1994b. Images: My Life in Film. Tr. Marianne Ruth. London. ―. 2001. After the Rehearsal. In The Fifth Act. Tr. Joan Tate and Linda Haverty Rugg. New York. Bergström, Lasse. (1992) 1995. Bergman’ s Best Intentions. Tr. Richard E. Nord. In Roger W. Oliver. Ingmar Bergman: An Artist’s Journey on Stage, on Screen, in Print. New York. Biedermann, Hans. 1991. Symbollexikonet. Tr. Paul Frisch, Joachim Retzlaff. Stockholm. Billquist, Fritiof. 1960. Ingmar Bergman: Teatermannen och filmskaparen. Stockholm. Bradley, A.C. (1904) 1963. Shakespearean Tragedy. London. Bredsdorff, Thomas. 1986. Magtspil: Europæiske familiestykker. Samtalen I teatret – samtale med teatret. København. Brook, Peter. (1968) 1972. The Empty Space. Harmondsworth. Chevrel, Yves. 1989. Henrik Ibsen: Maison de poupée. Paris. Cooper, J.C. 1978. An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols. London. Cowie, Peter. 1992. Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography. London. Duncan, Paul/Wanselius, Bengt, eds. 2008. The Ingmar Bergman Archives. London. Ekmanner, Agneta/von Sydow, Max. 1996. Regissör Ingmar Bergman och hans skådespelare. In Margareta Wirmark, ed. Ingmar Bergman: Film och teater i växelverkan. Stockholm. Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London/New York. Eldridge, Florence. 1979. Reflections on Long Day’s Journey Into Night: First Curtain Call for Mary Tyrone. In Virginia Floyd, ed. Eugene O’Neill: A World View. New York. Euripides. (1954) 1973. The Bacchae and Other Plays. Tr. Philip Vellacott. London. ―. 1991. Backanterna. Opera i två akter. Theatre program. Tr. Jan Stolpe/Göran O. Eriksson. Stockholm. ―. 1996. Backanterna. Theatre program. Tr. Jan Stolpe/Göran O. Eriksson. Dramaten, Stockholm. Falck, August. 1935. Fem år med Strindberg. Stockholm. Fischer-Lichte, Erika.(1983)1992.The Semiotics of Theater. Tr. Jeremy Gaines/Doris L. Jones. Bloomington.

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Forslund, Bengt. 2003. Molander, Molander, Molander: En släktkrönika med tonvikt på Gustaf och Olof Molander, film- och teaterlegender under ett halvt sekel. Stockholm. Fraser, Antonia. (1969) 1994. Mary, Queen of Scots. London. Gossman, Lionel. 1963. Men and Masks. A Study of Molière. Baltimore. Gross, Nathan. 1982. From Gesture to Idea: Esthetics and Ethics in Molière’s Comedy. New York. Halfmann, Ulrich, ed. 1987. Eugene O’Neill: Comments on the Drama and the Theater. A Source Book. Tübingen. Harsh, Philip Waley. (1944) 1965. A Handbook of Classical Drama. Stanford. Haugen, Einar. 1979. Ibsen’s Drama: Author to Audience. Minneapolis. Heed, Sven Åke. 1989. En väv av tecken: Teatertexten och dess betydelse. Lund. Heilman, Robert Bechtold. 1963. This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear. Seattle. Hjelm, Keve. 2004. Dionysos och Apollon: Tankar om teater. Ed. Hannes Meidal. Stockholm. Holder, Margareta. 2005. Scenography in Action: Space, Time, and Movement in Theatre Productions by Ingmar Bergman. Stockholm. Huizinga, Johan. (1945) 2004. Den lekande människan: (homo ludens). Tr. Gunnar Brandell. Stockholm. Höök, Marianne. 1962. Ingmar Bergman. Stockholm. Ibsen, Henrik. 1931. Peer Gynt. Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, 6. Eds. Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht and Didrik Arup Seip. Oslo. ―. 1932. Gengangere. Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, 9. Eds. Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht and Didrik Arup Seip. Oslo. ―. 1933. Et dukkehjem. Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, 8. Eds. Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht and Didrik Arup Seip. Oslo. ―. 1964. Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem. Tr. Rolf Fjelde. New York. ―. 1976. Peer Gynt: En dramatisk dikt. Tr. Lars Forssell. Stockholm. ―. 1989. Ett dockhem. Theatre program. Dramaten, Stockholm. ―. 1991. Peer Gynt. Theatre program incl. drama text. Tr. Lars Forssell. Dramaten, Stockholm. ―. 1993. Peer Gynt: Et dramatisk dikt. Kommentarutgave ved Asbjørn Aarseth. Oslo. ―. 2002. Gengångare: Ett familjedrama. Theatre program incl. drama text. Tr./adapt. Ingmar Bergman. Dramaten, Stockholm. Innes, Christopher. 1993. Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992. London/New York. Iversen, Gunilla. 1998. The Terrible Encounter with a God: The Bacchae As Rite and Liturgical Drama in Ingmar Bergman’s Staging. Nordic Theatre Studies, 11. Johnston, Brian. 1989. Text and Supertext in Ibsen’s Drama. University Park, PA. Kaminsky, Stuart M., ed. 1975. Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism. London/ Oxford/New York. Kermode, Frank. 2000. Shakespeare’s Language. London. Kitto, H.D.F. (1956) 1964. Form and Meaning in Drama: A Study of Six Greek Plays and Hamlet. London/New York. Koskinen, Maaret. 1993. Spel och speglingar: En studie i Ingmar Bergmans filmiska estetik. Stockholm. ―. 1998. Minnets spelplatser: Ingmar Bergman och det självbiografiska vittnet. Aura. Filmvetenskaplig tidskrift. IV:4. ―. 2001. Ingmar Bergman: “Allting föreställer, ingenting är.” Filmen och teatern – en tvärestetisk studie. Nora.

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Kott, Jan. (1964) 1966. Shakespeare our Contemporary. Tr. B. Taborski. Garden City, N.Y. Kronlund, Dag. 2007. Hundra år på Nybroplan: Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern under ett sekel. Stockholm. Lahr, John H. 1994. Winter Songs.The New Yorker, Oct. 3. Long, Robert Emmet. 1994. Ingmar Bergman: Film and Stage. New York. Löfgren, Lars. 1997. Teaterchefen: Bakom maskerna. Stockholm. ―. 2003. Svensk teater. Stockholm. Marker, Lise-Lone. 1983a. The Magic Triangle: Ingmar Bergman’s Implied Philosophy of Theatrical Communication. Modern Drama, 26: 3. Marker, Frederick J. /Marker, Lise-Lone, eds. 1983b. Ingmar Bergman: A Project for the Theatre. New York. ―. 1989. Ibsen’s Lively Art: A Performance Study of the Major Plays. Cambridge. ―. (1982) 1992. Ingmar Bergman: A Life in the Theater. Cambridge. Marowitz, Charles. 1986. Prospero’s Staff: Acting and Directing in contemporary theatre. Bloomington, IND. Mishima, Yukio. 1967. Madame de Sade: A Play. Tr.. Donalds Keene. New York. ―. 1989. Markisinnan de Sade: Skådespel i tre akter. Tr. Gunilla Lindberg-Wada/Per Erik Wahlund. Stockholm. ―. 1989. Markisinnan de Sade. Theatre program. Dramaten, Stockholm. Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. (2001) 2008. The Misanthrope, Tartuffe and Other Plays. Tr. Mary Slater. Oxford. ―. Misantropen. Theatre program incl. Drama text. Tr. Hans Alfredson. Dramaten, Stockholm. Moore, W.G. 1949. Molière: A New Criticism. Oxford. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus/Schikaneder, Emanuel. 1975. Trollflöjten/The Magic Flute/Die Zauberflöte. Libretto accompanying the sound recording of the TV opera. Stockholm. Müller, Wolf Dietrich. 1980. Der Theaterregisseur Ingmar Bergman: dargestellt an seiner Inszenierung von Strindberg’s ‘Traumspiel’. Munich. Nelson, Robert J.1964. The Unreconstructed Heroes of Molière. In: Jacques Guicharnaud. Molière: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Nowak, Lilian. 1983. Dramatens publik. Stockholm. Näslund, Erik/Sörenson, Elisabeth. 1988. Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern 1788-1988: Jubileumsföreställning i fyra akter. Höganäs. Oliver, Roger W. (1992) 1995. Bergman’s Trilogy: Tradition and Innovation. In Roger W. Oliver. Ingmar Bergman: An Artist’s Journey on Stage, on Screen, in Print. New York. Olofgörs, Gunnar. 1995. Scenografi och kostym. Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss: En verkorienterad monografi. Stockholm. Olsson, Tom J.A. 1977. O’Neill och Dramaten. Stockholm. O’Neill, Eugene. 1956. Long Day’s Journey into Night. New Haven. ―. 1988. Lång dags färd mot natt. Theatre program. Dramaten, Stockholm. Palmstierna-Weiss, Gunilla. 1995. Scenografi och kostym: Fragment av helheter. Exhibition catalogue. Stockholm. ―. 2013. Minnets spelplatser. Stockholm.

Bibliogr aphy

257

Pavis, Patrice. 1982. Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre. Tr. Susan Melrose and others. New York. Pütz, Peter. 1970. Die Zeit im Drama: Zur Technik dramatischer Spannung. Göttingen. Quigley, Austin E. 1985. The Modern Stage and Other Worlds. New York/London. Raleigh, John Henry. 1965. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Carbondale/Edwardsville, IL. Raz, Jacob. 1983. Audience and Actors: A Study of Their Interaction in the Japanese Traditional Theatre. Leiden. Rokem, Freddie. 1986. Theatrical Space in Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg: Public Forms of Privacy. Ann Arbor. ―. 2000. Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. Iowa City. Rosenberg, Marvin. 1972. The Masks of King Lear. Berkeley. Rosenqvist, Christina. 1994. Målaren i Mörk. Dramat, 2. Schiller, Friedrich. Ed. Arthur Kutscher Schiller, Friedrich. (1996) 2008. Don Carlos and Mary Stuart. Tr. Hilary Collier Sy-Quia/ Peter Oswald. Introd. Lesley Sharpe. Oxford. ―. 2000. Maria Stuart. Theatre program. Dramaten, Stockholm. ―. 2010. Maria Stuart. Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe, 9:1. Weimar. Scott, A.C. (1955)1966. The Kabuki Theatre of Japan. New York. Shakespeare, William. 1879³. Shakspere’s Dramatiska Arbeten, 1-12. Tr. C.A.Hagberg. Lund. ―. (1972) 1978. King Lear. Ed. Kenneth Muir. London. ―. 1982. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins.. London. ―. 1984. Kung Lear. Drama text with indicated performance changes. Tr. Britt G. Hallqvist. Dramaten, Stockholm. ―. 1986a. Hamlet. Tr. Britt G. Hallqvist. Stockholm. ―. 1986b. Hamlet. Theatre program. Dramaten, Stockholm. ―. 1993a. The Winter’s Tale. Ed. J.H.P. Pafford. London/New York. ―. 1993b. En vintersaga. Tr. Britt G. Hallqvist/Claes Schaar. Stockholm. ―. 1994. Vintersagan. Theatre program. Tr. Britt G. Hallqvist/Claes Schaar. Dramaten, Stockholm. ―. 1996. The Winter’s Tale. Ed. Stephen Orgel. Oxford. Simon, Alfred. 1964. From Alceste to Scapin. In: Jacques Guicharnaud. Molière: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Sjögren, Henrik. 1968. Ingmar Bergman på teatern. Stockholm. ―. 2002. Lek och raseri: Ingmar Bergmans teater 1938-2002. Stockholm. Sjöman, Vilgot. 1963. L 136: Dagbok med Ingmar Bergman. Stockholm. ―. 1969. Surdegen. Stockholm. ―. 2001. Äntligen rebell: Mitt personregister. Urval 01. Stockholm. Smidt, Kristian. 2000. Ibsen Translated: A Report on English Versions of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and A Doll’s House. Oslo. Sprinchorn, Evert. 1966. Julie’s End. In Carl Reinhold Smedmark, ed. Essays on Strindberg. Stockholm. Stahl, E.L. 1954. Friedrich Schiller’s Drama: Theory and Practice. Oxford. Steene, Birgitta, ed. 1972. Focus on the Seventh Seal. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. ―. 2005. Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide. Amsterdam. ―. 2009. Ibsen and Multi-Authorship: Ingmar Bergman’s Production of Gengangere. In Sven Åke Heed/Roland Lysell, eds. Ibsen in the Theatre. Stockholm.

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Strindberg, August. 1959. Open Letters to the Intimate Theatre. Tr. Walter Johnson. Seattle/London. ―. 1964. Fröken Julie. Ed. Carl Reinhold Smedmark. In August Strindbergs dramer, 3. Stockholm. ―. 1971. A Dream Play. Adapt. Ingmar Bergman. Tr. Michael Meyer. London. ―. 1976. Fröken Julie. Eds. Sven-Gustaf Edqvist/Katarina Ehnmark. Stockholm. ―. 1981-2013. August Strindbergs Samlade Verk. Eds. Lars Dahlbäck/Per Stam. Stockholm. ―. 1984. Fräulein Julie. In Werke in zeitlicher Folge, 5. Ed. Wolfgang Butt. Tr. Peter Weiss. Frankfurt am Main. ―. 1985a. Fröken Julie. Theatre program. Dramaten, Stockholm. ―. 1985b. Fröken Julie. Drama text with indicated performance changes. Dramaten, Stockholm. ―. 1986. Ett drömspel. Theatre program. Dramaten, Stockholm. ―. 2000. Spöksonaten. Theatre program. Dramaten, Stockholm. Timm, Mikael. 1994. Ögats glädje: Texter om film. Stockholm. ―. 2008. Lusten och demonerna: Boken om Bergman. Stockholm. Törnqvist, Egil. 1969. A Drama of Souls: Studies in O’Neill’s Super-naturalistic Technique. New Haven. ―. 1973. Bergman och Strindberg: Spöksonaten–drama och iscensättning. Dramaten 1973. Stockholm. ―. 1988. Staging A Dream Play. In Göran Stockenström, ed. Strindberg’s Dramaturgy. Minneapolis. ―. 1995. Ibsen: A Doll’s House. Cambridge. ―. 2000. Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata: From Text to Performance. Amsterdam. ―. 2001a. A Life in the Theater: Intertextuality in Ingmar Bergman’s Efter repetitionen. Scandinavian Studies, 73: 1. ―. 2001b. Det talade ordet: Om Strindbergs dramadialog, Stockholm. ―. 2003. Bergman’s Muses: Aesthetic Versatility in Film, Theatre, Television and Radio. Jefferson, NC. ―. 2004. Eugene O’Neill: A Playwright’s Theatre. Jefferson, NC. ―. 2006. Ibsen–byggmästaren. Amsterdam. ―. 2008. I Bergmans regi. Amsterdam. ―. 2010. Strindberg: The Master Weaver. Bari. ―. 2011. Strindbergs dramatiska bildspråk. Amsterdam Contributions to Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 7, ed. Henk van der Liet. Amsterdam. ―. 2012. Drama as Text and Performance: Strindberg’s and Bergman’s Miss Julie / Drama som text och föreställning: Strindbergs Fröken Julie och Bergmans. Amsterdam Valency, Maurice. 1966. The Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to Modern Drama. New York. Vogelweith, Guy. 1972. Le Psychothéâtre de Strindberg. Paris. Wells, Stanley. 1970. Literature and Drama. With Special References to Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. London. Wiingaard, Jytte. 1976. Teatersemiologi. Copenhagen. Williams, David, ed. (1988) 1992. Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook. London. Wirmark, Margareta. 1996. Ingmar Bergman och Dramatentraditionen. In Margareta Wirmark, ed. Ingmar Bergman: Film och teater i växelverkan. Stockholm. Zern, Leif. 1993. Se Bergman. Stockholm. ―. 1996. Från avstånd till närhet. In Margareta Wirmark, ed. Ingmar Bergman: Film och teater i växelverkan. Stockholm.



DVD list

William Shakespeare, Kung Lear/King Lear 1. Lear disinherits Cordelia. 2. Lear and the Fool. 3. Cornwall kicks out Gloucester’s eye. 4. Lear: “This great stage of fools.” 5. Edmund and Edgar belt-wrestling. August Strindberg, Fröken Julie/Miss Julie 1. The opening: Jean and Kristin. 2. Jean slaughters the greenfinch. 3. The end: Jean and Julie prepare her suicide. August Strindberg, Ett drömspel/A Dream Play 1. The Officer waiting for Victoria. 2. The degree ceremony. 3. The Coalheavers. 4. The School: the Officer as pupil. William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1. The murder of Gonzago. 2. The mad Ophelia hands out nails. 3. Hamlet and Laertes sword-fighting. 4. The end: arrival of Fortinbras’ army. Eugene O’Neill, Lång dags färd mot natt/Long Day’s Journey into Night 1. The opening: the Tyrone family. 2. Edmund reads aloud from his notebook. 3. Jamie admits love-hatred for Edmund. 4. Mary’s end monologue. Yukio Mishima, Markisinnan de Sade/Madame de Sade 1. Renée’s marriage. 2. “Save Alphonse.” 3. Anne and Saint-Fond. 4. Renée and her mother. 5. Renée and the blinding light. 6. The end: de Sade rejected.

260 

The Serious Game

Henrik Ibsen, Ett Dockhem/A Doll’s House 1. Helmer and Nora: money and intercourse. 2. Nora and Rank: the stocking sequence. 3. Nora’s tarantella. 4. The end: Nora’s departure. Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt 1. Peer’s goat story. 2. The Haegstad wedding. 3. Among the trolls. 4. The Boyg. 5. Aase’s death. 6. The Cairo asylum. 7. The Lean Man. 8. The end: the reunion of Peer and Solveig. William Shakespeare, Vintersagan/The Winter’s Tale 1. Hermione between Leontes and Polixenes. 2. Hermione before the court. 3. Perdita and Florizel. 4. Leontes flaggelant. 5. Hermione’s resurrection. 6. The end: Time.} Jean-Baptiste Molière, Misantropen/The Misanthrope 1. The opening: Blind Man’s Buff. 2. Oronte recites his poem. 3. Célimène and Alceste in bed. 4. Célimène and Arsinoé. 5. Célimène revealed and abandoned. 6. The end: Alceste alone. Euripides, Backanterna/The Bacchae 1. Chorus: “Come Bacchae.” 2. Chorus and Thalatta. 3. Pentheus and Dionysus; B directs. 4. The thunderstorm. 5. Dionysus’ revenge. 6. The end: the Bacchae place their thyrsus staffs on Semele’s altar.

DVD list

August Strindberg, Spöksonaten/The Ghost Sonata 1. The Old Man, the Student and the Milkmaid. 2. The drowning of the Milkmaid. 3. The hanging of the Old Man. 4. The end: death of the Young Lady. Friedrich von Schiller, Maria Stuart/Mary Stuart 1. Elizabeth courted by emissaries of the French dauphin. 2. Leicester plans a meeting between Elizabeth and Mary. 3. Confrontation of the two queens. 4. Leicester witnesses Mary’s execution. 5. The end: Elizabeth abandoned. Henrik Ibsen, Gengångare/Ghosts 1. The opening: Mrs Alving, Regine, Osvald. 2. Mrs Alving and Manders: “Ghosts.” 3. The Orphanage burns. 4. Osvald’s blood illness. 5. The end: Mrs Alving performs euthanasia on Osvald.

261

Index Aarseth, Asbjørn 138n About All These Women see Bergman, Ingmar Aeschylus 181 Oresteia 181 After the Rehearsal see Bergman, Ingmar Aftonbladet see Journals Albee, Edward 18 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 18 Alfredson, Hans 157, 158, 247 Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love 17, 145-147, 152, 154, 226, 246 Jaktslottet 145 Songes 145, 146, 226 Andréason, Sverker 65, 68, 104, 105, 131, 141, 157, 164(n) Arden Shakespeare, The 25 Artaud, Antonin 17 Ashmore, Peter 124n August, Pernilla 18, 246, 250, 251 Bacchae, The see Euripides / Strindberg, August Bach, Johann Sebastian 61, 66 Toccata and Fugue, No. 10 66 Toccata in d minor 61 Bæckström, Tord 31n Bartók, Béla 186, 226, 249 Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta 186 Beck, Ingamaj 147n Beckett, Samuel 17, 189 Beethoven, Ludwig van 85, 183, 186, 225 Sturm, Der (The Tempest); see also Gespenster 183 Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor see Sturm, Der Bennich-Björkman, Bo 63n Bergman, Ingmar passim About All These Women 104n After the Rehearsal 20, 21n, 22, 62n, 180 Best Intentions, The 164n Cries and Whispers 110n Devil’s Eye, The 112n Face, The (The Magician) (1958) 13 Faithless (2000) 62n Fanny and Alexander 14, 23n, 39n,72n, 111n, 146n, 150 God’ Silence see Silence, The In the Presence of a Clown 173n Jack Among the Actors 14 Magic Lantern, The (autobiography) 20 Persona 14, 36n Ritual, The 172n, 180 Saraband 143

Scenes from a Marriage 13, 39, 115, 116n, 212n, 214n Seventh Seal, The 13, 139n, 173n, 204n Silence, The 171 Smiles of a Summer Night 13, 164n, 166n Through a Glass Darkly 13 Ur-Faust 13 Virgin Spring, The 187 Wild Strawberries 127n Winter Light 13 Wood Painting 13 Best Intentions, The see Bergman, Ingmar Birth of Tragedy, The see Nietzsche, Friedrich Björkstén, Ingmar 105 Böcklin, Arnold 67, 183 Toteninsel 67(n) Borkman, John Gabriel 102n Börtz, Daniel 171, 172, 248, 250 Bosse, Harriet 61n Bradley, A.C. 25, 26n, 73n Brecht, Bertold 17, 130n Mother Courage 130n Threepenny Opera, The 17 Bredsdorff, Thomas 37n, 50n, 68 Brook, Peter 17, 25 Carpelan, Bo 101n Chamberlain, Neville 137n Chekhov, Anton 39n Three Sisters 39n Chopin, Frédéric 61, 64, 65 Funeral March 61, 64, 65 City Theatre, Malmö see Theatres Cries and Whispers see Bergman, Ingmar Crimes and Crimes see Strindberg, August Dagens Nyheter see Journals Devil’s Eye, The see Bergman, Ingmar Didrichsen, Malene 213 Modern Woman, The 213 Doll’s House, A (Ett dockhem) see Ibsen, Henrik Don Juan see Molière, J.B.P. Donnér, Jarl W. 98 Dramat see Journals Dramaten, Stockholm see Theatres Dream Play, A see Strindberg, August Ekdahl, Emilie 14 Ekelöf, Gunnar 104 Ekerot, Bengt 88 Eldridge, Florence 88 Ellefsen, Tove 104, 124, 131, 136 Endre, Lena 18, 136, 244, 245, 247, 250 Enquist, Per Olov 50n

264  Night of the Tribades, The 50n Erik XIV see Strindberg, August Essen, Siri von 42 Euripides 11, 171-181, 223, 248, 253, 260 Bacchae, The 11, 171-181, 223, 248, 253, 260 Expressen see Journals Face, The (The Magician) (1958) see Bergman, Ingmar Faithless (2000) see Bergman, Ingmar Fanny and Alexander see Bergman, Ingmar Father, The see Strindberg, August Faust see Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Feuer, Donya 106, 150, 158, 237, 242, 243, 246, 247, 248, 250 Flinck, Torsten 172n, 247 Forslund, Bengt 15n Forssell, Lars 129, 132, 243 Freud, Sigmund 57n Traumdeutung 57n Fröhling, Ewa 39n, 237 Fröken Ur 155n Funeral March see Chopin, Frédéric Für Aline see Pärt, Arvo Furumo, Richard 145, 146 Gespenster (Ghost) sonata 183 Ghosts (Gengangere) see Ibsen, Henrik Ghost Sonata, The see Strindberg, August Gierow, Karl Ragnar 88, 129, 241 God’ Silence see Silence, The Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 71n, 196 Faust 71n Göranzon, Marie 39n, 238 Gossman, Lionel 168 Gösta Berling’s Saga see Lagerlöf, Selma Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning see Journals Göteborgs-Posten see Journals Grieg, Edvard 129 Grönstedt, Olle 151 Hallqvist, Britt G. 25, 36, 69, 73(n), 74, 144, 237, 240, 246, 249, Hamlet see Shakespeare, William Hammarén, Torsten 15 Heiknert, Karl-A lex 101n Heilman, Robert Bechtold 26n, 34n Hiraoka, Kimitaké 101 Hjelm, Keve 15 Höök, Marianne 13 Ibsen, Henrik 226, 231, 234, 242, 243, 250, 253 Doll’s House, A (Ett dockhem) 12, 18, 39, 49n, 115-127, 148, 209, 214n, 215, 223-226, 229-231, 233, 242 Ghosts (Gengangere) 12, 19, 209-221, 223, 224, 226, 227, 229, 232, 234, 250, 261 Nora 39

The Serious Game

Peer Gynt 10, 129-141, 223, 224, 226, 227, 233, 234, 243 Rosmersholm 52n Wild Duck, The 159n Iceman Cometh, The see O’Neill, Eugene Intimate Theatre, Stockholm see Theatres In the Presence of a Clown see Bergman, Ingmar Jack Among the Actors see Bergman, Ingmar Jacobs, Barry 5, 11, 242 Jahnsson, Bengt 68 Jaktslottet see Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love Jenkin, Harold 69 Journals: Aftonbladet 134, 188, 220 Dagens Nyheter 18, 25, 68, 104, 124, 131, 136, 146, 158, 165, 168, 173, 181, 189, 194, 207 Dramat 147n Expressen 17, 68, 116, 194, 207 Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning 31n Göteborgs-Posten 65, 68, 104, 131, 141, 157, 164 Kvällsposten 58 Neue Zürcher Zeitung 188 New York Herald Tribune 181 NU 151 Politiken 37n, 68 Sundsvalls Tidning 149 Svenska Dagbladet 87n, 88n, 98, 104n, 105, 164n, 168, 172n, 184, 191, 194, 197, 207 Sydsvenska Dagbladet 98, 168, 194 Upsala Nya Tidning 219 Kermode, Frank 37n, 152n King Lear see Shakespeare, William Koroly, Charles 104, 207, 242, 247, 249 Kott, Jan 37, 69n Kurosawa, Akira 28 Kvällsposten see Journals Lagerlöf, Selma 164n Gösta Berling’s Saga 164n Larsén, Carlhåkan 168, 194 Larsson, Lisbeth 68 Léhar, Franz 69, 225 Merry Widow, The 69, 225 Long Day’s Journey into Night see O’Neill, Eugene Löwenstierna, Frans 145 Löwenstierna, Henrik 145 Löwenstierna, Hugo 145, 146, 230 Lundberg, Christina 149 Lundin, Bo 107 Lysell, Roland 219 Macbeth see Shakespeare, William Madame de Sade see Mishima, Yukio

265

Index

Magic Flute, The see Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus / Schikaneder, Emanuel Magic Lantern, The (autobiography) see Bergman, Ingmar Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamlain de 13, 18 Marker, Frederick J. 9, 115n Marker, Lise-Lone 9, 115n Marowitz, Charles 17, 25 Marquis de Sade see Sade, Marquis DonatienAlphonse-François de Mary Stuart (Maria Stuart) see Schiller, Friedrich von Merry Widow, The see Léhar, Franz Michelangelo 219 Pietà 219 Sistine Chapel 219 Misanthrope, The see Molière, J.B.P. Mishima, Yukio 11, 17, 101-113, 241, 253 Madame de Sade 11, 17, 101-113, 241, 253 Miss Julie see Strindberg, August Mnouchkine, Ariane 157 Modern Woman, The see Didrichsen, Malene Molander, Olof 15(n), 57, 65, 88, 184, 186, 187 Molière, J.B.P. 9, 11, 18, 117å, 157-169 Don Juan 71n, 110, 112n, 205n Misanthrope, The 117, 157-169, 224, 226, 228, 229, 231, 232, 247 Moon for the Misbegotten, A see O’Neill, Eugene Mörk, Lennart 139, 146, 150, 243, 246 Mother Courage see Brecht, Bertold Mourning Becomes Electra see O’Neill, Eugene Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 143, 173 Magic Flute, The 143, 173 Muir, Kenneth 25, 36 Munch, Edvard 189, 210, 212n, 219 Room of the Aunts, The 212n Tête-à-tête 210 Vampire 219 Murder of Gonzago, The see Shakespeare, William Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta see Bartók, Béla Nelson, Robert J. 168 Neue Zürcher Zeitung see Journals New York Herald Tribune see Journals Nietzsche, Friedrich 88, 181 Birth of Tragedy, The 181 Night of the Tribades, The see Enquist, Per Olov Nobel Prize 137 Nora see Ibsen, Henrik Norén, Lars 17 NU see Journals Nykvist, Sven 14

Olin, Lena 53, 68, 237, 239 Olofgörs, Gunnar 34n, 41n, 116 O’Neill, Carlotta 88, 99n O’Neill, Eugene 5, 11, 18(n), 87-99, 181, 241, 253 Iceman Cometh, The 88 Long Day’s Journey into Night 11, 18, 87-99, 241, 253 Moon for the Misbegotten, A 88 Mourning Becomes Electra 88, 181 Oresteia see Aeschylus Orgel, Stephen 148 Östergren, Pernilla 17, 239, 240, 243 Othello see Shakespeare, William Palmstierna-Weiss, Gunilla 26, 40n, 41n, 89, 237, 238, 241, 242 Pärt, Arvo 220, 251 Für Aline 220 Partie carrée, La see Watteau, Antoine Pavlova, Anna 150 Peer Gynt see Ibsen, Henrik Pelican, The see Strindberg, August Persona see Bergman, Ingmar Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor see Sturm, Der Pietà see Michelangelo Pinter, Harold 17 Pirandello, Luigi 59 Six Characters in Search of an Author 59 Politiken see Journals Quigley, Austin E. 55 Residenztheater Munich see Theatres Ring, Lars 164n, 191, 197 Ritual, The see Bergman, Ingmar Rokem, Freddie 104n Room of the Aunts, The see Munch, Edvard Rosen, Ingrid von 238 Rosenberg, Marvin 35 Rosmersholm see Ibsen, Henrik Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm see Theatres Royal Opera, Stockholm see Theatres Royal Shakespeare Company 53n Royal Theatre, Copenhagen see Theatres Rushdie, Salman 137 Sade, Marquis Donatien-Alphonse-François de 101, 103 Sæverud, Harald 129 Saga of the Folkungs see Strindberg, August Salander, Anna 143n Saraband see Bergman, Ingmar Scenes from a Marriage see Bergman, Ingmar Schaar, Claes 144, 246 Schering, Emil 183 Schikaneder, Emanuel 143 Magic Flute, The 143

266  Schiller, Friedrich von 11, 18, 195-207, 249-250 Mary Stuart (Maria Stuart) 18, 195-207, 249-250 Schwartz, Nils 207 Seventh Seal, The see Bergman, Ingmar Shakespeare, William 11, 12, 18(n), 25-37, 69-85, 88, 89, 143-155, 223, 234, 237, 240, 246 Hamlet 25, 69-85, 92, 223-225, 227-232, 240 King Lear 10, 16, 25-37, 223, 224, 226, 227, 229-234, 237 Macbeth 25 Murder of Gonzago, The 77, 82 Othello 25 Winter’s Tale, The 12, 143-155, 223, 224, 226-232, 234, 246 Shibusawa, Tatsuhiko 101 Silence, The see Bergman, Ingmar Silesius, Angelus 163, 164, 224 Sistine Chapel see Michelangelo Six Characters in Search of an Author see Pirandello, Luigi Sjöberg, Alf 15, 17, 18n, 44n Sjögren, Hendrik 9, 18, 75, 194n, 210n, 235, Sjöman, Vilgot 104n, 184 Smiles of a Summer Night see Bergman, Ingmar Sofia, Ulrika 145 “Sömngångare” (Sleepwalkers) see Strindberg, August Songes see Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love Sörenson, Elisabeth 87, 194 Sprinchorn, Evert 46, 138(n) Stahl, E.L. 205n Stanislavsky, Konstantin 21 Steene, Birgitta 6, 9, 12, 39n, 214 Stormare, Peter 17, 234, 237, 238, 240, 241 Strasberg, Lee 21 Strindberg, August 5, 6, 9, 15, 16, 18, 37n, 39-53, 55-68, 71n, 87, 102n, 115, 120(n), 121, 144, 146, 150, 152, 181, 183-194, 210, 225, 233, 234, 238, 249 Bacchae, The 10, 11, 19, 171-181, 223-225, 227-229, 231, 233, 248 Crimes and Crimes 183 Dream Play, A 15, 55-69, 111, 144, 146, 181, 223, 225, 230, 233, 234, 238 Erik XIV 37n Father, The 150 Ghost Sonata, The 5, 9, 13, 15, 67n, 71n, 168, 183-194, 213, 214, 218(n), 223, 224, 226-232, 234, 249 Miss Julie 5, 11, 17, 39-53, 115, 223, 227-230, 232-234, 238 Pelican, The 15, 210, 214, 216n Saga of the Folkungs 15 “Sömngångare” (Sleepwalkers) 210 Stronger, The 50n

The Serious Game

To Damascus I 15, 57, 59, 102n, 152 To Damascus II 102n Stronger, The see Strindberg, August Sturm, Der (The Tempest) see Beethoven, Ludwig van Sundsvalls Tidning see Journals Svenska Dagbladet see Journals Swan Lake, The 61 Swedish Theatre, Helsinki see Theatres Sydow, Max von 21, 129, 159n Sydsvenska Dagbladet see Journals Teje, Tora 88 Tête-à-tête see Munch, Edvard Theater am Marstall see Theatres Theatres City Theatre, Malmö 69n, 129, 157, 184 Dramaten, Stockholm 10, 15-18, 37n, 39, 58, 61, 69, 85, 87(n), 88, 92, 101(n), 102n, 115, 116, 126, 130, 143, 146, 147, 150, 155, 157n, 171, 184, 224 Intimate Theatre, Stockholm 16, 183, 184 Residenztheater Munich 10, 37, 39(n), 59, 102(n), 115 Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm 10, 12, 16, 18, 158 Royal Opera, Stockholm 171 Royal Theatre, Copenhagen 69, 150 Swedish Theatre, Helsinki 101n Theater am Marstall 39 The Place, London 53n The Place, London see Theatres Threepenny Opera, The see Brecht, Bertold Three Sisters see Chekhov, Anton Through a Glass Darkly see Bergman, Ingmar Tidblad, Inga 92 Timm, Mikael 18, 27n, 76 Toccata and Fugue, No. 10 see Bach, Johann Sebastian Toccata in d minor see Bach, Johann Sebastian To Damascus I see Strindberg, August To Damascus II see Strindberg, August Törnqvist, Egil 5, 6, 184n Torsslow, Stig 99n Toteninsel see Böcklin, Arnold Traumdeutung see Freud, Sigmund Tudor, Antony 150 Upsala Nya Tidning see Journals Ur-Faust see Bergman, Ingmar Vampire see Munch, Edvard Villiger Heilig, Barbara 188 Virgin Spring, The see Bergman, Ingmar Vogelweith, Guy 43n Vogler, Elisabet 14 Vogler, Henrik 21n, 22, 180

Index

Wahlund, Per Erik 58, 184, 242 Wassberg, Göran 193n, 197, 240, 248, 249, 250 Watteau, Antoine 158 Partie carrée, La 158 Weiss, Peter 39 Westling, Barbro 188, 220 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? see Albee, Edward

267 Wild Duck, The see Ibsen, Henrik Wild Strawberries see Bergman, Ingmar Winter Light see Bergman, Ingmar Winter’s Tale, The see Shakespeare, William Wood Painting see Bergman, Ingmar Zern, Leif 104, 116, 146, 158, 160, 165, 168, 173, 181, 189, 194, 207



Also by Egil Törnqvist

A Drama of Souls: Studies in O’Neill’s Super-naturalistic Technique (1968) Svenska dramastrukturer (1973) Bergman och Strindberg: Spöksonaten ‒ drama och iscensättning. Dramaten 1973 (1973) Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure (1982) Strindberg’s ‘Miss Julie’: A Play and Its Transpositions (with Barry Jacobs, 1988) Transposing Drama: Studies in Representation (1991) Filmdiktaren Ingmar Bergman (1993) Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs (1995) Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation (1999) Strindberg’s ‘Gosht Sonata’: From Text to Performance (2000) Det talade ordet: Om Strondbergs dramadialog (2001) Bergman’s Muses: Aesthetic Versatility in Film, Theatre, Television and Radio (2003) Eugene O’Neill: A Playwright’s Theatre (2004) Strindberg som TV-dramatiker (2004) Ibsen ‒ byggmästaren (2006) Strindberg on Drama and Theatre (2007) I Bergmans regi (2008) Strindberg the Master Weaver (2010) Strindbergs dramatiska bildspråk (2011) Drama as Text and Performance: Strindberg’s and Bergman’s ‘Miss Julie’ / Drama som text och föreställning: Strindbergs ‘Fröken Julie’ och Bergmans (2012)