Fanny et Alexandre

BERGMAN RECOGNISES THAT THEATRE has a primary function in his work stating that “I can exist without making films. But I can’t exist without making theatre” or “Theatre is my profession, cinema is my vocation”. This double career started at an early age, with the puppet theatre he played with as a child, like the little boy in Fanny and Alexander, or in the visit of a film studio when he was a teenager. Theatrical and cinematographic activities were intertwined for Bergman, even more so than for Visconti: the same troupe of actors, the same effects of quotations from one art to another. From 1938 to 2002, he made some forty films and staged more than one hundred plays, alternating between positions as artistic director of the Helsingborg Municipal Theatre and of the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm (the Dramaten), while also working in Gothenburg, Malmö and Munich. His productions toured all around the world.

Bergman staged his own plays as well as a vast range of authors. While he didn’t hide his predilection for Strindberg, his compatriot, his eclectic repertoire also broadly encompassed world dramatic literature: Ibsen, Peter Weiss, Pirandello, O’Neill, Ostrovsky, Büchner, Gombrowicz, Tabori, Botho Strauss, Mishima, Camus, Anouilh, Goethe, Tennessee Williams, Garcia Lorca, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Brecht... and Molière, whom he admired above all.

His vision of the stage was strongly influenced by his practice of framing film shots: he grouped the actors, asked them to address the audience, as they would in front of the camera, he sculpted the bodies with lighting that focused the action.

In an iconoclastic approach, he mixed periods in the same production, while returning to the fundamentals of the “historical” stage: evoking the architecture of the Globe Theatre for Shakespeare, using chandeliers and oil lamps from the classical period for Molière, casting a man in the role of Madame Pernelle in Tartuffe, as had been done when the play was first performed. Accustomed to the collage/editing techniques of filmmaking, he didn’t hesitate to manipulate the text to make his own interpretation more forceful. Thus, for example, he moved Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” monologue to the middle of scene with the players.

Throughout his career, he increasingly stripped back his aesthetic, restricting the performance space, reducing the stage to a simple trestle, or placing the actors in sight between their scenes to maintain a link and tension with the audience. The latter technique drew inspiration from an architectural feature of the Salle Richelieu known as the “foyer des travestissements” [the chamber of transformations]: a space close to the stage where the actors change or rest without breaking the link with the stage.

Bibliography: Odette Aslan, Ingmar Bergman, introduction et choix de textes, Actes Sud-papiers, collection “Mettre en scène”, 2012. Odette Aslan, “Ingmar Bergman metteur en scène et auteur”, in Revue d’histoire du théâtre, 2015-III, no. 267, p. 451-463.