Arthur Miller's Global Theater

Miller in Scandinavia Focus on Denmark

136 Kirsten Herold Miller in Scandinavia Focus on Denmark In his autobiography, Timebends, and again during a major interview held on the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday, Arthur Miller laments that he has often had more recognition abroad than he has had in his own country.1 He attributed this in part to the loss of a genuine theater culture in the United States and to the fact that European theater is still heavily subsidized. Denmark would certainly be a case in point. In the years since the first Danish production of Death of a Salesman, Miller’s plays have been performed frequently—in the state-subsidized National Royal Theater in Copenhagen and in the three major regional theaters,Aarhus,Aalborg,and Odense, as well as in commercial venues. In other words, Miller’s works have been critically acclaimed as modern classics, while also proving commercially viable. Indeed, after Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, there has been no playwright of comparable importance in the Danish theater.2 The numbers alone tell the story.In a country of five million people, Miller’s plays are frequently performed,and in the past two decades more so than ever. Salesman alone has been given several professional productions ,three of them mounted in the 1990s.During the 2000–2001 season, the most important theater in Denmark, the National Royal Theater, celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the original Danish production of Death of a Salesman with a new staging of the landmark play. The Crucible,All My Sons,AView from the Bridge,After the Fall, Incident atVichy, The Price,The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, and Broken Glass have all been seen in multiple productions during the same period.The film version of Salesman with Dustin Hoffman (originally made for AmericanTV) had a long and successful run, as did the 1996 film version of The Crucible, and Salesman is one of the most frequently taught texts at the high school and college level, where it is traditionally interpreted as an indictment of the so-called American dream. Moreover, the Danish translation of the play can be found in many homes. In short, Salesman is the seminal text of post–World War II drama in Denmark. Miller in Scandinavia 137 Part of the reason for Miller’s enormous impact can be seen as simply being in the right place at the right time. First produced in 1950, Salesman arrived on the Danish scene at a historical moment ready to welcome international and particularly American influences. At the same time, Miller’s dramaturgy felt very familiar,as the play was performed in the tradition of the Ibsenite,socially realistic drama so well known to Scandinavian audiences.Salesman also came along when people could afford to go to the theater again. Denmark had been under German occupation from 1940 to 1945, and, although it had suffered nowhere near the hardships of many other European countries, the economy had been considerably depressed. Most important,after a long draught,the late 1940s were particularly receptive to international drama.The theater of the 1930s had been both nationalistic and didactic (with the exception of Kjeld Abell),and during the war dramatic activity limited its scope even further.Actual resistance to the Germans was largely passive until 1943, but one way to register protest was to assert one’s national identity in all the arts.Thus, the dramatic repertoire consisted largely of the Danish classical pieces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (by writers such as Ludvig Holberg, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and Adam Oehlenschlager), the Bournonville ballets, various musicals with historic themes, or escapist entertainment.3 With the selection of films severely limited by the ban on British and American fare, theater was one of the few public arenas for the performing arts.After 1943, when the policy of cooperation broke down, the job of the censor (a Danish national who saw his main function as keeping Danish actors and directors out of German prisons) was made even more difficult because anything that hinted of nationalism was banned.4 The situation reached a crisis in 1944 when the Germans kidnapped and brutally murdered the leading Danish playwright of the time, the minister Kaj Munk, author of several patriotic historical dramas. After the war, domestic dramatists returned to Ibsenite problem plays, but at the same time the door was also open to plays from the international community. From the late 1940s on, the play list of the Copenhagen theaters included the most important...