Bergman in the Theater

BERGMAN IN THE THEATER WHEN INGMAR BERGMAN BECAME General Manager of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre in July 1963, there were some nasty whisperings around Stockholm. Their substance was that he was too involved with film-making to give his new post the attention it deserved. Although most of these mutterings were caused by the "Royal Swedish Envy"-a term Swedes use to designate public reaction to the success or promotion of a fellow citizen-Bergman seemed aware of his responsibilities. Accordingly, he announced that he was giving up films. At his age and with his achievements in cinema, such a decision could well have been treated with a certain suspicion. Nonetheless, both Winter Light and The Silence, parts of a brilliant trilogy on the nature of love, had not been clearly understood nor fairly judged by many critics. When I talked with him at this time, he had just finished cutting All These Women, his first color film, which he described somewhat defensively as "a joke." Perhaps even then he sensed what the reviews would be. In short, he was more than glad to put films aside for a while. Beginning a new career as Intendant of the Royal Dramatic Theatre , he obviously did not want it thought that he would run the house as a hobby in between films. Interestingly enough, most of the Bergman canon has been made-usually one a year-while he was directing and managing city theaters in Malmo, Norrkoping, Helsinborg , and Gothenburg. Before assuming his present position, he was a staff director of the Royal Dramatic for several years. Pressures of film-making kept him from doing little more, however, than Chekhov 's The Seagull and a striking production of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress for the Royal Opera. Now, after three years as Artistic Director-the usual contract term in a European subsidized theater-Bergman has announced his resignation , effective July, 1966. Since he has returned to films, using the summer of 1965 to make Persona on an isolated island off the Swedish coast, there has been speculation that running the theater was merely a holiday from films, that it was temporary employment during an artistic "block," that it made demands upon him that he could not meet, and that organizational problems were simply too time-consuming. Persons close to Bergman vigorously deny the first charge. And so would I. When I first met him, his enthusiasm, his vigor, his dedication to the challenge of running the Royal Dramatic ]70 1966 BERGMAN IN THE THEATER 171 were entirely genuine, even inspiring. As to the second charge, that of using the theater to overcome an unproductive period in his cinema career, it is ridiculous on two grounds. First, only now are audiences beginning to see the connections and the deep insights which permeate Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence, viewed as a trilogy. They are anything but the work of a man from a "block." However, he was apparently depressed at the reception of the latter two motion pictures. Winter Light had not done well, and The Silence was a box-office success for all the wrong reasons. He winced when I told him it was being shown in one of New York's 42nd Street theaters ordinarily reserved for double bills like Riot in a Girls' Dormitory and Sex Slaves of Pleasure Island. He sighed. "I think I am glad to be away from film-making for a few years," he said. He had even suggested that there might never be another Bergman film, which prompted some of his detractors to suggest a parallel with Mozart: so young and already written out! The third and fourth allegations seem the basis for Bergman's decision to give up his Intendancy. Although assisted by a tightly organized, highly devoted staff, Bergman apparently found that the demands of overseeing a theater complex like the Royal Dramatic exacts a grim toll of a man's physical and artistic resources. An extensive hospitalization in the late spring of 1965 delayed the filming of a script called The Demon. Recuperating, Bergman discarded the project and wrote the entirely new screenplay of Persona-the title...