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EUGENE O'NEILL AND THE ROYAL DRAMATIC THEATER OF STOCKHOLM: THE LATER PHASE EVER SINCE 1923, WHEN Anna Christie was staged in Stockholm, the Royal Dramatic Theater, popularly referred to as "Dramaten," has taken a special interest in the American playwright, Eugene O'Neill. Without doubt, this theater's great success in producing such plays as Strange Interlude (in 1929) and Mourning Becomes Ele'ctra (in 1933) was to a large extent responsible for the Nobel prize awarded to O'Neill in 1936. Several reasons may be offered for O'Neill's unusual place in Sweden's cultural life. In his speech accepting the Nobel prizewhich he did not deliver personally since ill health prevented him from making the trip to Stockholm-O'Neill called himself a disciple of August Strindberg. This statement endeared him to the Swedish public. More important, the Swedish interpretation of O'Neill's works benefited from a thorough re-evaluation of Strindberg's psychological-symbolic plays, which was largely brought about through productions by such prominent stage directors as Olof Molander, Per Lindberg, and Al£ Sjoberg. Besides, the distinguished Strindberg scholar Martin Lamm, for many years the stage director, and Karl Ragnar Gierow, playwright and director of the Royal Dramatic Theater from 1951 to 1963, were great admirers of O'Neill. Finally, for more than four decades, literary critics and theater reviewers kept the name of O'Neill before the public and helped to enhance the reputation of the American playwright and his work in Sweden. When A Moon for the Misbegotten opened at Dramaten on April 24, 1953, it was the beginning of a series of remarkable productions of O'Neill plays which either, as in the case of this particular play, never reached Broadway or, in the other instances, were at first not available to New York audiences. In 1947, A Moon for the Misbegotten had closed on its American tour; according to Swedish reports the play had failed partly because it showed too many weaknesses and mainly because it was considered immoral. Anders osterling, a poet and secretary of the Swedish Academy (1941-1964), was the first Swedish critic to review the new O'Neill play when it appeared in book form. He felt that, although this was not one of O'Neill's 300 1967 O'NEILL AND STOCKHOLM 301 most outstanding works, it had the same "dramatic vitality" that had been clearly manifested in his other works. Osterling added that the play "smelled" liquor even more than The Iceman Cometh and that "the passionately stormy climax is veiled in a fog of unrestrained drinking that without question must seem repulsive" and concluded: "A knowledge of the importance of the [drinking] problem in O'Neill's personal life casts a fatal shadow and gives that aspect of his dramatic realism a definite and disheartening coloring."l When, on March 24, 1953, A Moon for the Misbegotten opened at the Malmo Civic Theater under the direction of Henrik Dyfverman, it was not treated kindly by the reviewers. A good many faults were found with the author-e.g., A Moon for the Misbegotten is "the work of an aging writer"2-but particularly with the director and the cast. Some critics felt that the play should have been left untouched3 or that it would have been wiser to wait until Ingmar Bergman, who was soon to join the theater as one of its stage directors, had arrived.4 In general, criticism of the play was more favorable than that of the production. One month later, the reception of the Stockholm production of A Moon for the Misbegotten at Dramaten, under the direction of Olof Molander, was very different. In contrast to the Malmo production , which lasted less than three hours, Molander offered an unshortened version which proved "that the point of this unique drama lies in the necessity of the viewer experiencing everything, absolutely everything that happened to Josie Hogan and Tyrone during the eighteen hours from noon until sunrise on this autumn day in 1923, when their fate was sealed."5 Now one saw how "charged" a production of this play can be.6 Molander's direction was "masterful " and the...

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