A Doll's HouseRoyal Dramatic Theatre, Main stage, 1989 In his 1989 Dramaten production of A Doll's House, for which playwright Klas Östergren made a new Swedish translation, Bergman followed Ibsen's text very closely but made dramaturgical and scenography changes."It is fantastic." - Istvan Szabo |
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The main action took place on a raised platform, in a boxlike room with high-placed grated windows, suggestive of a patrician vestibule or a prison cell. Alongside the platform but outside the main acting area, chairs were placed on row where characters would sit down like silent observers instead of exiting the stage as prescribes in Ibsen's play text. On Hilde's chair sat a doll when she herself was not present on stage. Nora was the only one who never left the acting area.
In a combined rehearsal-press conference interview, Bergman stressed the importance of the child as a tragic figure in a collapsing marriage. (He had received criticism for omitting the children in his own film Scenes from a Marriage.
The Swedish critical consensus was the Bergman had cut a certain 'dusty' wordings in Ibsen's play but had stayed very close to its core. Yet he had created, dramaturgically speaking, another play: 'When Ingmar Bergman sets up Ibsen's A Doll House, it becomes a production minted more by the director than by the dramatist'.
Bergman focussed on the psychological aspects of Nora's life and shifted the attention to a relationship tragedy. At times he turned the drama into a triangle drama between Nora, Hilde and Dr. Rank.
'Bergman does not produce and foremost, stage a play that is a debate about women's liberation. [His] subject is the nature and love, the stage is as so often in Bergman- a magnetic field where the poles are eroticism and death.'
In sharp contrast to such negative responses to Bergman's Nora, one finds Leif Zern's enthusiastic review: 'Today I am not going to have any inhibitions, for what Bergman has done with A Doll's House is a performance so beautiful, so moving, so incomparably rich that I have to go back to 1969 to find anything similar in his and Dramaten's history'.
All the reviewers agreed that this was a production that allowed the performers to overshadow the play's traditional feminist theme: 'Everything exists to give the actors the greatest possible opportunities to depict their roles'.
In keeping with Bergman's increasing tendency to include meta- theatrical features in his stage productions, his Doll's House included allusions to theatre history and to the Dramaten tradition. Not all critics appreciated such sophisticated twinkles to an audoience with a good theatre tradition: 'Ingmar Bergman seems more interested in talking to Alf Sjöberg and Orson Welles than with us'.
Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)