Bergman
”The beginning and the end and almost everything in between”
Ingmar Bergman and Dramaten
In his autobiography The Magic Lantern Ingmar Bergman has described the great impression Alf Sjöberg’s production of the Swedish fairy tale Big Claus and Little Claus made on him as a twelve-year-old in 1930: ”I remember every detail: the lights, the set, the sunrise over the small elves in national costume, the boat on the river, the old church with St Peter as doorkeeper.” It was Christmas and it was the first time Bergman saw a performance at Dramaten.
He would often return to his seat in the upper circle: ”Occasionally over the years, in the quiet hour between rehearsals and performance, I used to go and sit in the old seat and give in to nostalgia, feeling with every beat of my pulse that this impractical and faded place was really my home.” His relationship with Dramaten was deep and life-long. Or, to use his own words, ”the beginning and the end and almost everything in between”.
Bergman was appointed head of Dramaten in January 1963. The minister in charge wanted him to turn it into “a modern theatre”. It was doing excellently, but it was considered to be old-fashioned. Bergman certainly stirred things up. More actors were employed and a six-day-week was introduced, another stage was added by closing the restaurant, the actors were given influence over repertoire and casting and were allowed to appoint representatives, salaries were greatly increased and the drama school was turned over to the State. Some of the artistic staff were made redundant and new ones employed
These measures were overwhelming and expensive. It was all well over budget, the minister became anxious and Bergman left after only three years. The Board regretted his decision and stressed the fact that his actions had been “of tremendous importance to the general activities and development of Dramaten”.
Prior to his appointment Bergman had done two productions at Dramaten. He debuted in 1951 with Björn-Erik Höijer’s Light in the Shack, in which the legendary Anders de Wahl, who was admitted to the drama school in 1889, made his final appearance at Dramaten. According to Bergman, Ragnar Josephson had promised him a permanent place at the time, a promise that the next head, Karl Ragnar Gierow, did not feel obliged to fulfil. Bergman was not employed until 1960.
Bergman’s second production, as a permanently employed director, was Chekhov’s The Seagull in 1961. Despite a brilliant cast including Eva Dahlbäck, Ulf Palme, Per Myrberg and Christina Schollin, Bergman considered it a failure and immediately asked for leave of absence.
During his three years as head of Dramaten Bergman directed as many as seven productions there. He later regretted doing so many. They were “done in a rush, patched together”. The only performance he was pleased with was Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, which had not turned out to be very successful at any of the previous attempts that had been made at Dramaten. With Gertrud Fridh as Hedda Gabler, it became one of the theatres most memorable performances. This was in 1964.
Bergman had opted for a radical approach. No cluttered, “Ibsenenesque” middle class setting with heavy furniture, velvet curtains, carpets and plants. Bergman made do with only the bare essentials: plain, dark red flats, a couch, a cupboard, a mirror and a piano. It was the characters, their expectations and their conflicts that were important. It was a concept that Bergman came to use time and time again.
Woyzeck 1969
During Erland Josephson’s nine years as head of the theatre, Bergman engaged in a long line of interesting productions. In Büchners Woyzeck, 1969, the main stage at Dramaten was transformed into an arena theatre with the audience seated in the auditorium as well as on stands on stage. The upper circle and gallery were closed off, seats were not numbered and all tickets were five crowns. No one was forced to hang their coat in the cloakroom and there were two performances every night. It was a simple idea: it should like going to the cinema, nothing special, unpretentious – Dramaten was a modern theatre. Thommy Berggren was brilliant as Woyzeck, and Gunnel Lindblom did a moving performance as his wife Marie.
Bergman has captivated us with the story of how he, at the age of seventeen in 1935, night after night saw Olof Molander’s production of Strindberg’s A Dream Play from a hide-out backstage. He describes the experience as “combustive”. The deeply religious Molander had shown him “the innermost magic of theatre”. To Bergman Molander was the grand master.
A Dream Play 1970
Bergman directed a Strindberg play – A Dream Play – for the first time at Dramaten in 1970. Molander’s influence did not prevent Bergman from doing his own thing. Together with set designer Lennart Mörk he removed the mystique, the weight of religious ruminations and most of the theatrical ballast. The play was performed on an empty stage where the black concrete walls, light battens and spotlights became prominent features. The scenery basically consisted of a chair, a table and a few grey flats. One critic wrote that “It’s no longer about metaphysics – it’s theatre”. The performance, which was just under two hours, was in the form of an avant-garde dream play in the chamber play format.
King Lear 1984
Bergman staged another two Strindberg plays at Dramaten during Josephson’s time: Ghost Sonata in 1973 and To Damascus in 1974, and in 1976 he began rehearsals for The Dance of Death, which were so abruptly interrupted by the tax police. The dramatic consequences resulted in a period of self-chosen exile. He was not to direct another play – Shakespeare’s King Lear – at Dramaten until 1984.
This time collaborating with set designer Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, Bergman again set the play on an empty stage. The area where the actors appeared was circular, in the background were two tall, curved walls joined by a central slit. Everything was the colour of blood. A wide, black-painted staircase led down to the auditorium as a way of including the audience. Even the costumes, redolent of Renaissance splendour, were red and black. There were no loose decorative elements. The actors’ bodies were efficiently used as tables, chairs and walls. King Lear became Bergman’s most performed production and the Shakespeare production that had been performed the greatest number of times at Dramaten ever. Jarl Kulle was a brilliant Lear.
A new head of Dramaten was appointed the following year. Bergman’s own candidate was the head of Swedish television, Lars Löfgren. Bergman never regretted the choice. The eleven years Löfgren was head of Dramaten was an extremely creative period for Bergman who directed as many as fourteen productions, and Löfgren put all the theatre’s resources at his disposal.
There was an emphasis on the classics: Strindberg, Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, O’Neill and Euripides; but there were some contemporary names too, for example Mishima, Strauss, Tabori and Gombrowicz. In 1986, Peter Stormare appeared as an enraged Danish prince dressed in a leather jacket and woolly hat. The critics saw him as Bergman’s alter ego, young and angry. During the jubilee year of 1988 – Dramaten’s bicentenary – Bergman paid homage to Egene O’Neill by staging his A Streetcar Named Desire, the first staging of the play at Dramaten since the legendary first performance in 1956.
Madame de Sade 1989
In 1989, Bergman made one departure from the classics with Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade, which many claim to be Bergman’s greatest artistic achievement. Lars Löfgren had introduced the play in order to show that Dramaten had the most accomplished ensemble of women actors in Europe, and they did the theatre proud. The six actresses against the background of an immensely beautiful set designed by Charles Koroly, were all brilliant. It stayed on the repertoire for another six years and toured all over the world – Bergman had put Dramaten on the world map of drama.
In A Doll’s House, also from 1989, Bergman and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss brought the various qualities of the building itself to the fore. They set the play in the Jugend period around the turn of the last century, which was when the theatre was built. Nora’s dress was inspired by the dresses worn by the Greek Fates that feature on the proscenium and the furniture was brought in from the Pauli café. Pernilla Östergren played Nora.
In 1991 Peer Gynt filled the Målarsalen stage, up among the rafters at the top of the house, almost to the point of bursting. Ibsen’s huge drama required a major makeover. The ceiling was opened up, new electrical cables were drawn and a new ventilation system installed. Yet again, the audience encountered a bare, confined stage, which this time could be raised, lowered, tipped, made into waves and effectively lit with the help of a system of ropes coming down through the ceiling. Börje Ahlstedt played Peer, the role of his life.
There were many who thought that Löfgren’s final production, Euripide’s The Bacchae in 1996, would also be Bergman’s farewell from the theatre. The Greek tragedian’s work was taken to be a logical ending. But Bergman had more to offer. He had come into contact with a new play by Per Olov Enquist, The Picture Makers. It was based on the adaptation for the screen of Selma Lagerlöf’s novel The Phantom Carriage, a film classic and Bergman favourite. It was just too hard to resist. Göran Wassberg designed the sets – and the new head of Dramaten, Ingrid Dahlberg, could, in 1998, add a Bergman premiere to her achievements.
There were to be another three: a new production of Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata in 2000 with Jan Malmsjö as a bald-headed Hummel; Schiller’s Mary Stuart the same year, in which Pernilla August and Lena Endre met as queens, and, finally, Ibsen’s Ghosts in 2002. Pernilla August did Mrs Alving, a Nora who never left. Bergman also translated the work into Swedish.
A Winter's Tale 1994
Bergman has said that the production that was closest to his heart, his ”most important” production, was Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale from 1994. It is not hard to understand. As a fourteen-year-old he had set it up at his model theatre, and it had accompanied him all his life. In this production the slightly curved back wall featured the windows in the Marble Foyer and details were taken from the main auditorium. In the ceiling was Carl Larsson’s painting “The Creation of the Drama”, with its sky, branches and green foliage. Lennart Mörk’s set design was a fantasy inspired by the theatre building where stage and auditorium cunningly reflected each other.
The production thereby turned into a tribute to Dramaten, the theatre and the building; the exceptional place that Bergman had discovered during the Christmas of 1930, a place he would never forget.
-Dag Kronlund