Staffan Valdemar Holm: Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman, one ponders … No man is an island.
Theatre? But wasn’t Bergman a film director? Indeed he was, and a fantastic one too, but theatre was his great love. You only need to watch his films to see it.
The international myth-making around Bergman was very entertaining to follow. A French newspaper thought he had isolated himself at Faro, on the Portuguese Algarve coast. They had missed the important dots over a and o in Swedish.
Ingmar had probably never set foot in Portugal, and he was probably pleased with the misunderstanding.
Had he not settled on his own St Helena in self-chosen exile in order to endure the absence of the ambiguous friendships at the theatre? When he knew that he couldn’t do it anymore, that he no longer was strong enough to be as good as he wanted to be. A drained and lonely man!
He felt safe on his island, accompanied by his demons. He often longed for the friendships of the theatre community that he had fled when he felt that he could no longer live up to the demands placed on him on a professional level. More than once he told me over the phone: ”I miss them like hell, you know!”
And then he went on to ask me if I had seen this or that production from Berlin, Munich or Paris. He knew exactly what was going on, and he had access to every single television channel that broadcast drama.
There he was, sitting on an island, in self-inflicted isolation, right in the middle of the Baltic, and he was so in control.
To me, this festival is dedicated to the idea of this man who sits on an island, which in turn sits in the middle of a northern inland sea – a human being who until the very end managed to stay curious, who refused to give in to the arrogance of the periphery.
Ingmar Bergman was not over, above or beyond contemporary drama.
He was right at the centre.