• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

IBSEN News and Comment The Journal of The Ibsen Society of America Vol. 27 (2007) Hedda Gabler. Stadsteater, Stockholm (review, page 2). Lars-Peter Roose IBSEN ON STAGE, 2007 Mark Sandberg: Hedda Gabler at Stockholm’s Stadsteater 2 Hedda Gabler at San Francisco’s A.C.T. 5 Two Doll Houses: Stockholm’s Dramaten and Oslo’s Torshov 8 Hanna Zmijewska-Emerson: the Commonweal’s Ghosts in Lanesboro 12 Rochelle Wright: Peer Gynt at Stockholm’s Stadsteater 14 Marvin Carlson: the Schaubühne’s new Ghosts in Berlin 16 NEWS AND NOTICES “What’s the Word?” ISA Members Put Ibsen on MLA Public Radio 18 TH Call for Papers: 12 INTERNATIONAL IBSEN CONFERENCE, SHANGHAI 19 th 11 Annual Commonweal Theatre Ibsen Festival 20 The 2007 Ibsen Essay Contest 20 IBSEN IN PRINT Annual Survey of Articles 21 Book Review: Thomas Van Laan on Toril Moi’s Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism 45 IN MEMORIAM: NORMAN RHODES 50 The Ibsen Society of America Department of English, Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York 11201 www.ibsensociety.liu.edu Established in 1978 Rolf Fjelde, Founder is a production of The Ibsen Society of America and is sponsored by support from Long Island University, Brooklyn. Distributed free of charge to members of the Society. Information on membership in the Society and on library rates for Ibsen News and Comment is available on the Ibsen Society web site: www.ibsensociety.liu.edu ©2007 by the Ibsen Society of America. ISSN-6171. All rights reserved. Editor, Joan Templeton Editor’s Note: We try to cover important United States productions of Ibsen’s plays as well as significant foreign productions. Members are encouraged to volunteer; please contact me at [email protected] if you are interested in reviewing a particular production. Hedda Gabler. Stadsteater, Stockholm. April 19 – November 24, 2007. It all boiled down to the sofa: a monstrously modern, thirty-foot long sofa placed in the middle of a bare stage at the Stockholm City Theater. Brutalist in design, it came from the lobby of Kulturhuset just outside the theater hall and was originally designed in the early 1970s by that building’s architect, Peter Celsing. Its brown leather was scuffed, soiled and even torn by more than three decades of use. The design of the sofa was rational and imposing, with only the slightest hint of accommodation made to the needs of the human body at its very end in the form of a slight dip near the armrest. A matching sofa of the same length in light tan leather was joined to the back, facing away from the audience. With no curtain and the stage fully exposed as the audience filed in, the two sofas conveyed an overwhelming sense of horizontality and stasis. This sofa concept was exploited brilliantly in the production, directed by the Norwegian Alexander Mørk-Eidem. The setting was modernist in a paradoxically historicist sort of way; taking his cue from the sofa and the Kulturhuset building itself, Mørk-Eidem set his Hedda in the period of Stockholm’s modernist architectural transformation in the 1960s and 1970s. The props were all authentic to the time, each updating elements of the original text: a rotary telephone with an enormously long cord served as the link to the outside world, replacing the maid’s function; a phonograph playing bassanova jazz on vinyl LPs substituted for Hedda’s piano; a slide projector show (with real slides!) stood in for the covert conver- Page 2 sation scene between Hedda and Løvborg. Hedda Hedda’s dissatisfaction into a question of cool. was dressed in a white miniskirt, her long blond She and Brack (Gerhard Hoberstorfer) were not hair perfectly coifed in a 60s style. The rest of the more aristocratic and high-born than those around costuming—Thea’s orange miniskirt and bouffant them—they were more hip. Their shared disdain for hairdo, Løvborg’s skinny the others was a matter of tie and suit, and Brack’s in-groups and out-groups. crew cut and hip black Tesman, as played by An- glasses—located this pro- dreas Kundler, was not duction squarely in the below them in class and time of modern “cool.” mentality, but because he The care with which this was just a bit square. His was done created quite a research topic, “domestic different effect than the handicrafts in Flanders,” usual simple translation seemed even more pa- of nineteenth-century de- thetic in such hip sur- Lars-Peter Roose tails into purely contem- roundings. Similarly, in porary equivalents, a move that can come across a world of cool, there was little place for aunts and as irritatingly banal and superficial when motivated lavender; in fact, it was apparently so hard to think by a demand for “relevance today.” Instead, this of a 1960s equivalent to Tante Julle that the part production felt both temporally transposed and was simply written out of the cast. (Her expository historical at the same time—just not nineteenth- function in act one was handled instead through a century historical. By taking this stance, Mørk- one-sided telephone call with Tesman on stage.) Eidem was able to draw into his production a range This was a reduced and streamlined produc- of connotations from a specific moment in modern- tion in every sense (no intermission, one hour and ist architecture and design, seemingly direct from fifty minutes playing time). But it was surprising Stockholm’s Sergels Torg right outside the theater’s that in spite of the omissions (what, no vine leaves?, doors. The play resonated with the mixed legacy of no hat scene?, no slippers?, no “imagine that!”?, rationalism and brutalism, of progress and destruc- no manuscript burning on stage?), one didn’t re- tion, of democratization and dehumanization. And ally miss what might seem like the most crucial all of this was effectively concentrated in the sofa. elements of the original play. The deep structure of It was a potent setting for Hedda Gabler. The play began in fact with Hedda (Helena af San- “The play resonated with the deberg) entering the room through a mechanically mixed legacy of rationalism sliding door in the back wall. She walked over to and brutalism, of progress and the phonograph, put on some jazz, and then sat lis- tening for several minutes on the sofa. The music destruction, of democratization is actually by a contemporary German group called and dehumanization.” “2raumwohnung,” and the tune, “Melancholisch schön,” is sexy-smooth. Once one got over the Hedda Gabler was somehow intact. One could see surprise of seeing Ibsen’s play open in this way, the play in a new light, yet without getting stuck the music actually seemed an appropriate choice in a constant back-and-forth comparison with the for a production of Hedda Gabler, which can be original. (Incidentally, this was what Mørk-Eidem both melancholy and beautiful, with just a tinge of praised about directing his Swedish actors; in the German decadence. This milieu did one more in- theater’s official press release, he noted that his cast teresting thing for Ibsen’s play, however: it turned seemed remarkably unfettered by an internalized Page 3 sense of how Ibsen ought to be played, and that this at key moments, Sandeberg would suddenly give in turn freed him up to make his own adaptations.) us access to the turmoil beneath the surface. In the The rhythm of the play developed seam- first private conversation between Hedda and Thea lessly with the aid of the mirror-image sofas, which rotated into different positions to mark the transitions from scene to scene. The first shift was a 180-degree reverse of the initial position, then 90 degrees, then 220 degrees, etc. The characters clus- tered in various formations around the sofas—or perhaps “clustered” is not the right word, given the chasm that sometimes separated characters who were ostensibly sharing a single conversation. The intelligent blocking in this way explored the given physical characteristics of the sofa, often trans- forming the triangular character formations from Lars-Peter Roose the original text into something flatter and two-di- (Frida Hallgren), for example, when Thea slipped mensional, as if to underscore the instability of the and used the formal pronoun in spite of Hedda’s threesome. The physical gulf between characters in earlier instructions, Hedda did not just give her the some scenes furthered the estrangement effects in playful scolding that one usually sees at this point, others, even in scenes that would otherwise have but instead exploded with a shocking slap to the side of the head, leaving both Thea and the audi- ence stunned. Then she smiled and said, “You said “It was a shock ending that ‘Ni’.” Similarly, in the scene when Løvborg ran resolutely refused the possibility of off to the bachelor party after all, Hedda grabbed Thea’s hair and twisted it hard to get her to stay. One a beautiful death.” doesn’t, in fact, do such things; Hedda’s outbursts of violence formed such a contrast to her cool exte- rior that Thea was not the only one left wondering seemed perfectly normal; when characters sat close what kind of creature Hedda really was. to each other in the middle of the sofa, the miles of Sandeberg managed to convey the inten- empty space on each end made them seem uncom- sity of Hedda’s hunger for real beauty, which was fortably close. The sofa also provided the visual clearly identified as the deeper force somewhat at logic for the long flirtation between Hedda and odds with the façade of modern cool.

Load more

  52

Copy Link