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 Moliere, 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.