The Critical Reception of American Drama in Sweden

THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF AMERICAN DRAMA IN SWEDEN To THE SWEDISH CRITICS American drama is a twentieth-century phenomenon . Earlier American dramatists are totally unknown in Sweden, dramatists like James A. Heme, Bronson Howard, and Steele Mackaye who took their dramatic themes from the Civil War, or turned their work into liberal attacks on current social problems. When American dramatic products finally gained ground "in Sweden, it was not these early, often awkward but honest dramatic attempts that became associated with American theater but rather those elegant, superficially realistic, or melodramatic plays that announced Belasco's era on Broadway . It is not until the second decade of this century that we begin to notice the appearance of an occasional American product on the Swedish stage. Until then French farce, English comedy, and a few so-called problem plays' dominated the foreign repertory. The first American play to be produced in Sweden was Clyde Fitch's The Strongest , which was presented in Stockholm in 1911. A year later Margaret Mayo's Baby Mine appeared at the Vasa Theater in Stockholm. Both Clyde Fitch and Margaret Mayo were reintroduced to the Swedish theater program a few years later, the latter in 1918 with Polly of the Circus and the former in 1919 with The Truth. Together with Langdon Mitchell, Edward Sheldon, David Belasco, and a few others they constituted the Swedish acquaintance with American drama before 1920. As is perhaps to be expected, Swedish critical reception of the melodrama of American's Gilded Age and the years before the turn of the century was rather lukewarm. Before 1920 we find no extensive Swedish reviews of American plays; most often the critics confined themselves to brief, laconic, or satirical comments. Carl Laurin, leading drama critic of the time, wrote after the premiere of Clyde Fitch's The Stl'Ongest: "The USA has lately sent us the drama The Strongest, but it is among the weakest; that hard-working and productive continent has not yet been able to export good dramas."l Carl Laurin's pointed criticism set the tone for a great many reviews of American plays throughout the second and a good part of the third decades of this century. It was about this early, rather negative relationship between the American theater and the Swedish critics that Swedish actress Pauline Brunius wrote in retrospect in 1934: 1. Carl Laurin, Ros och Ris, II (Stockholm, 1915), p. 356. 71 72 MODERN DRAMA May American drama found no great favor with us here at home some fifteen, or twenty years ago. I remember how the press received the American plays that we then performed at the old Swedish Theatre, received them simply as completely unnecessary funk. And in some cases it was unjustified! But it was as though one did not want to believe that anything good could ever come from America.2 However, the oppositional and rebellious tendencies within the American theater after World War I were slowly to change both the Swedish opinion of American drama and the repertory of that drama in Sweden. Although French, English, and German works continued to dominate the list of imported plays, they now had to meet more serious competition from the U.S.A. At this time-and in fact up to the 1930's-the American repertory consisted of a fairly equal number of comedies and serious dramas. The light genre was represented by such Broadway successcs as Anne Nichols' Abie's Irish Rose and Edward Childs Carpenter's The Bachelor Father. A wisecrack product found its way to Stockholm in 1933 through Kaufman-Ferber's The Man IVho Came to Dinner, while American intellectual comedy was introduced to Sweden with S. N. Belnman's The Second Man. Early musicals also began to appear: Hammerstein-Romberg's The Desert Song in 1932, and two years later, The New Moon. News about the off-Broadway theaters had already begun to appear in the Swedish press. In 1919 a short commentary on the Provincetown Players was published in a Stockholm newspaper. It was followed in the same year by a fuller presentation of the American little theater movement in the stage organ Scenen.3 In 1923...