About the festival

Scroll down for information about the performances, showtimes and ticket information.

The first festival took place in 2009 and was a huge success. It was to a great extent a retrospective of Ingmar Bergman’s work. This time the festival presents innovative contemporary theatre, avant-garde in the same way as Ingmar Bergman’s creations were in his time. The performances are transboundary and mix different expressions like theatre, music and film. Live music is a part of several performances.

It´s with great pleasure, the Royal Dramatic Theatre welcomes the return of Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne and director Heiner Goebbels, who amazed critics and audiences alike at Ingmar Bergman International Theatre Festival 2009 with Eraritjaritjaka. This year he presents a unique collaboration with the legendary vocal quartet The Hilliard Ensemble in I Went to the House But Did Not Enter.

Schaubühne Berlin will participate with two extraordinary productions. Lars Norén’s play Demons, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, and the British directors Katie Mitchell’s and Leo Warner’s  epoch-making version of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, a major production that will be staged at Annexet, a part of Ericsson Globe Arenas.

From Vilnius in Lithuania the acclaimed director Oskaras Korsunovas will bring two productions, Miranda and The Lower Depths – compelling dramas that scrutinize contemporary society. Also from Vilnius comes Aldona Bendoriuté in the role of Sonja from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment in Sad Songs from the Heart of Europe, a production both intimate and powerful. This theatrical tour de force is directed by Kristian Smeds and presented by his Smeds Ensemble from Finland.

Dramaten’s own contribution to the festival is Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, directed by Stefan Larsson. This magnificent production, which premiered this year on February 11, is the first Swedish stage version of Bergman’s famous film.

In addition, the festival will include conversations with actors and directors from visiting companies, coordinated by Dramaten’s side programming Dramaten&.  Actors from Dramaten will moderate several of these conversations.

The festival will conclude with a unique performance on the main stage, created specifically for this occasion in cooperation with ten other theatres in the international theatre network Mitos 21. The production is based on the book Je suis complètement battue (I’ve been beaten all over) by Éléonore Mercier.

Welcome to the Ingmar Bergman International Theatre Festival 2012! 

Festival schedule -  Day by day.

  • Demoner (Demons/ Dämonen)
    by Lars Norén. Direction Thomas Ostermeier. Schaubühne Berlin, Germany.
    27 May 18.00, 28 May 18.00, Stora scenen (Main Stage)Frank comes home with the ashes of his dead mother. Frank and Katarina are childless, a couple for nine years. They live in a chic but messy apartment. Jenna and Thomas live in the flat underneath them; they are the same age but have three children. The meeting between the four of them becomes a game of humiliations, sexual provocations, unintended confessions and exhibitionistic attacks with undercurrents of emptiness and aggressive loneliness. Performed in German with Swedish surtitles.
  • Fanny & Alexander
    by Ingmar Bergman. Direction Stefan Larsson. Dramaten, Sweden.
    29 May 18.00, 30 May 18.00, 1 June 18.00, Stora scenen (Main Stage)The play based on Ingmar Bergman’s Oscar awarded film and TV-series is a tribute to theatre and many of the characters can be interpreted as mirroring different aspects of Bergman himself. The production has been running with full houses of appreciative audiences since it opened on February 11, 2012.The director Stefan Larsson, artistic director of Aarhus Theatre, Denmark, first came to Dramaten as an extra in Bergman’s King Lear (1984) and since performed as actor in Bergman’s Mary Stuart (2000). He started his directing career with Lars Noren’s “Rumäner” at theatre Plaza 1997, and at Dramaten with Patrick Marber’s Closer, followed by The Wild Duck, King Lear and Tracy Lett’s August – Osage County among others. Fanny and Alexander is his 25th production at Dramaten. Larsson’s previous productions of Bergman’s texts, Scenes from a Marriage (2009) and Autumn Sonata (2010) at Dramaten and Fanny and Alexander (2010) in Aarhus have been acclaimed successes. Performed in Swedish with English surtitles.
  • Miranda
    After Shakespeare’s The Tempest and other works. Direction Oskaras Korsunovas. OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, Lithuania.
    30 May 20.00, 31 May 18.00, Lilla scenen (Second Stage)Two protagonists in a barren flat cluttered with books and documents. Maybe a father and a disabled daughter? The man helps the younger woman with daily chores, feeding her, massaging her feet. He wants to read for her. She insists on a special text, Shakespeare’s Tempest. The man plays the various characters and she becomes Miranda, and also Ariel. But what is play and what is reality? Are we on Prospero’s island, or on a much more sinister place in another Archipelago? Performed in Lithuanian with Swedish surtitles.
  • Sorgsna sånger från Europas hjärta
    (Sad songs from the heart of Europe).
    Script after Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, direction and set design Kristian Smeds. Smeds Ensemble, Finland.
    30 May 18.00, 31 May 20.00, 1 June 18.00, 3 June 16.00, 4 June 17.00, 5 June 17.00, HansasalenDostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment told by Sonja Marmeladova. The sole actress brings us Sonja of today, a trafficking victim somewhere in Europe, or maybe very near to us? The production, premiered first time 2006, is a journey towards the essence of theatre. During the years the performance has developed to a minimalistic masterpiece with the protagonist and the viewer in a close and interactive experience. Performed in Lithuanian with Swedish interpretation.
  • Natthärbärget (The Lower Depths/Dugne)
    by Maxim Gorky. After Maxim Gorky’s play. Direction Oskaras Korsunovas. OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, Lithuania.
    1 June 20.00, 2 June 18.00, MålarsalenWe meet a group of actors at a table, facing us as in Leonardo’s The Last Supper. A press conference? A funeral? A party to celebrate… what? A mass, a potlatch? A sad portrait of our time, a farewell to the last century, a request of future? In Gorky’s legendary play from 1902 you could interpret the hobo Lupa as a carrier of hope, but in Korsunova’s version Lupa has already departed, and only the last act remains. The rest is… silence? Performed in Lithuanian with Swedish surtitles.
  • “Jag blev slagen klockan fjorton och fyrtiofem”
    (“I was hit at four fortyfive”)
    from Eléonore Merciers book Je suis complètement battue (I’ve been beaten all over).
    2 June 20.00, Stora scenen (Main Stage)During 17 years the author Éléonore Mercier wrote down the first sentence in each telephone call she received, working at a helpdesk of an organization against domestic abuse and violence. The result is not a novel, not an essay, not a pamphlet, not a mere document, or perhaps all of that together. It is a text consisting of 1653 chosen sentences, a choir of voices, each one witnessing of assaults inside or outside marriage but also about shame, fear and love. Most, but not all the calls were from women – about twenty of them came from men.Dramaten has sent an invitation to the theatre network Mitos 21 and some other theatres to be a part of a workshop/meeting and a performance on the Main stage based on texts from Mercier’s book.
    Every contributor in the project will make a personal choice of sentences from the book. Each theatre is asked to perform the text in the theatre´s own language. The performances will be joined together as one continuum and given once during the festival. The performance will be live streamed to other theatres in Sweden.
    The participating theatres are:
    Det Kongelige Teater , Copenhagen; Schauspiel Frankfurt; Théâtre National de la Colline, Paris; Deutsches Theater, Berlin; Katona Jószef Színház, Budapest; Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus; Mozarteum ,Salzburg; Dimitri Festival, Thessaloniki; Dramaten, Stockholm
  • Fröken Julie (Miss Julie/Fräulein Julie)
    by August Strindberg. Direction Katie Mitchell & Leo Warner. Schaubühne Berlin, Germany.
    4 June 20.00, 5 June 20.00, Globens AnnexStrindberg’s credo for realism rendered with chamber playing and highly sophisticated video technique. The story is told from the point of view of Kristin, the maid. The audience is witnessing a film shooting in a studio and simultaneously seeing the film, or are we, in fact, in Kristin’s head, eavesdropping and fantasizing about what is happening between Julie and Jean that fatal midsummer’s night? The telling becomes the story. Performed in German with Swedish surtitles.
  • I went to the house but did not enter
    Conception, music and direction Heiner Goebbels. With The Hilliard Ensemble. Texts by T.S. Eliot, Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Théàtre Vidy-Lausanne, Switzerland.
    5 June 20.00, 6 June 16.00, Stora scenen (Main Stage)Four gentlemen in three tableaux, four poets, one composer. Heinrich Goebbels astonished us at the Bergman Festival of 2009 with his unpredictable Eraritjaritjaka. This time he dismounts the walls between poetry, music, painting and theatre giving us something more than the sum of the terms, a Gesamtkunstwerk of our days? The Hilliard Ensemble offers us harmonic bliss as well as eloquence of silence to some of the most enigmatic lyrics of the last century.

Tickets

For tickets pleas call: +46-(0)8-667 06 80
Phone reception: +46-(0)8-665 61 00

Questions regarding repertoire and access information: publikservice@dramaten.se

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