The Magic Triangle: Ingmar Bergman's Implied Philosophy of Theatrical Communication

The Magic Triangle: Ingmar Bergman's Implied Philosophy of Theatrical Communication LISE-LONE MARKER "The true lhealIical creation must always remind the audience that it is watching a performance," Ingmar Bergman has declared in an interview. "I believe that if you try to depan from that rule, you will very soon collapse. Because the function of lhe spectator - if we lalk about an ideal spectator watching the ideal performance - is that he continually undergoes changes of mind, changes in his concentration." An instinctive rhythmic oscillation between engagement and detachment is, in Bergman's view, the key to lhe nature of the spectator's involvement in the mimetic experience. "From being completely involved at one instant," he argues, "the spectator is allhe very next instant aware of being in the theatre. The next second he is involved again, completely involved; then after three seconds he is back again in lhe lheatre. And that is a pan - and a very important pan - of his being a participant in the Iitual. - Because that word Verfremdung is a complete misunderstanding. The spectator is always involved and he is always outside, at one and the same time."1 This provocative statement of pIinciple by Bergman identifies a range of related issues that are fundamental to what might be called his implied philosophy of theatIical communication - "implied" because he is adamant in his refusal to discuss his creative methods in explicitly theoretical terms. For nearly four decades now, he has remained among the most stimulating and creative directors active in the European theatre - a fact that has sometimes been eclipsed by his reputation and achievements as a film maker. In his work for the stage, the one true basis of all reality is 10 be found, for Bergman, in the direct confrontation between the audience and the living actor. The spuIious "realism" of a physical setting that purports to be a "facsimile" of life holds no interest for him. Even in the face of the most severe technical challenges (Strindberg's A Dream Play or To Damascus, for example, or Ibsen's Peer Gym), he has remained steadfastly committed to a style cleansed of everything 25 2 LISE-LONE MARKER that could "de-theatricalize" the hypnotic presence of the living actor, thereby dissipating his power to influence and ultimately control the audience's emotional involvement. The art of the theatre, seen from Bergman's perspective, is both a popular and a collective art, arising out of an intensely collaborative creative process. This attitude predicates his familiar maxim that only three elements are ultimately necessary "for a theatrical production to function" - a text, actors, and an audience. Any discussion ofhis theatre poetics must inevitably focus on the nature of the interplay among the three dynamically interrelated components of this "magic triangle." In this connection, perhaps the most startling feature ofhis work in the living theatre has been his use ofdeliberate strategies, often very radical in nature, intended to realign the imaginative response of the spectator, so that he indeed remains always involved and always outside, at one and the same time. An ever stronger communicative bond is thereby forged between actor and audience, stage and auditorium. Familiar examples of how this attitude has spilled over into Bergman's films (for it is a case of his theatre work having influenced his film making in this respect) are plentiful. The security-shattering moment when the film breaks in Persona, the sound of Bergman's own voice instructing his film crew in Hour ofthe Wolf, the four "interludes" in which the actors come forward to comment on their roles in A Passion, or the inclusion of the audience as a "character" in The Magic Flute - these and other comparable "meta-filmic" strategies are intended, as Bergman says, "to awaken people for a moment, in order to send them back into the drama afterwards." He disagrees vigorously, however, with critics who persist in referring to such breaks in the action as "alienating" devices. In an interview published over a dozen years ago, he maintained: "I believe that if you pull the audience out of the action for a time and then lead them back into it, you will increase emotional...