The Dream PlayRoyal Dramatic Theatre, Small stage, 1970 Dissatisfied with his first TV-version from 1963 Bergman made his second of four performances of A Dream Play."It is as if I had never seen Strindberg's Dreamplay until now. In exactly one hour and forty-five minutes without an intermission one sits captivated, fascinated, caught in a great poet's and a great director's dream." - Håkan Tollet, Hufvudstadsbladet |
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Bergman was interviewed about the production in the radio where he talked about his difficulty with Strindberg's conception of Indra's daughter as a female Christ figure. It led him to make some radical dramaturgical changes having the character of Indra's daughter performed by to different actresses, one enacting the divine woman and the other representing Agnes, the earth woman.
Strindberg prepared for the opening of his Drömspel in 1907 by buying a slide projector with which he planned to project visual images to create a dreamlike mood. But he could no overcome the technical drawbacks of his primitive machine. In his 1970 version, Bergman utilized Strindberg's idea by painting a rectangular screen in the back of the stage, on which images could be projected.
Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)