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Index
- Egil Törnqvist
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9 - Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt
- Egil Törnqvist
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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.
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 Saverud'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.
14 - Friedrich von Schiller, Mary Stuart
- Egil Törnqvist
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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 difficult 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 five-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.
Serious Game
- Ingmar Bergman as Stage Director
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Though Ingmar Bergman became famous as a filmmaker, his roots-and, to some extent, his heart-were in the theater. He directed more than one hundred plays in his career, and The Serious Game takes a close look at fourteen productions he staged at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Looking closely at the relationship between the verbal and the visual, this book gives even longtime Bergman fans a new understanding of his sensitivity to nuance, his versatility, and his dedication to craftsmanship.
4 - August Strindberg, A Dream Play
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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.
8 - Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
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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. 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.
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 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).
7 - Yukio Mishima, Madame de Sade
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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, could via the theatre program be informed both about the author, the play, and the life and work of its absent central figure, Marquis Donatien- Alphonse-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).
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, 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)
Bibliography
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1 - B & Co.
- Egil Törnqvist
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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).
15 - Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts
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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 naive 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.
DVD list
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16 - The Serious Game
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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.
12 - Euripides, The Bacchae
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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. 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 Dionysus 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.
6 - Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
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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. 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.” 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 jubilee 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 Jamie 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 seemed to turn its back on him.
Preface
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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.
Production Data
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3 - August Strindberg, Miss Julie
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When Miss Julie 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.
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.” Partly brought up as a boy, she was rather masculine with her short, straight hair and her authoritarian manner.
10 - William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
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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). 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 death of Love, the survival of Love and the resurrection of Love. It was the resurrection that broke me” (B, 1994a: 38).
Also by Egil Törnqvist
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2 - William Shakespeare, King Lear
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- Book:
- Serious Game
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 10 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 18 December 2015, pp 25-38
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- Chapter
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Summary
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 finds, “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).