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REVIEWS EGIL TORNQVIST. Ibsen, Strindberg alld the Imimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation. Film Culture in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999. Pp. 240, illustrated. $49.95 (Hb); $24.95 (Pb). Reviewed by John Osburn, New York University Ibsen, Strindberg alld the Imimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation, by Egil Tornqvist, is factually informative but lacking in theoretical followthrough . Its main value is as a companion text to a viewing of the television productions themselves, especially in a classroom, where the choices to which Tornqvist calls our attention could be looked at and debated. In isolation, the book serves as a kind of reference work, an annotated videography of thirtythree television productions of thirteen plays, along with a section of eighteen beautifully reproduced stills. The descriptive chapters, one for each play, are divided into part one, on Ibsen, and part two, on Strindberg, and are bracketed by a prologue and epilogue that provide a semiotic framework for assessing the relationship between dramatic texts and stage or screen productions. Each chapter consists of a critical synopsis of the playscript, followed by an analysis of one or more television productions. either singly or in alternation. Tornqvist's expertise in the Scandinavian languages allows for some acute textual observations, both on the scripts and on translations and other script modifications (he is particularly critical of Michael Meyer's translalions of Ibsen). The individual chapters are at their most interesting in part two, perhaps a side effect of Tornqvist's view that the format of Strindberg's plays "fit[s] the small screen beller than Ibsen's," that the Ouidity of time and space in the late plays "anticipates the feature film," and that the preface to Miss Julie "anticipates television drama" when it "calls for 'a small stage and a small auditorium '" (188). Be that as it may, the perceived greater success of the Strindberg productions - along with Tornqvist's admiration for !ngmar Bergman, who directed more than one of them - may explain why the Strindberg productions are more vividly conveyed than the Ibsen productions. Beyond that, the Ibsen chapters are limited by a reductive view of Ibsen's thematics, applied to most of the six plays covered and positing an older pagan past in binary conOict with Christianity. This theme is a fundamental aspect of Ibsen's work, but its relation to Ibsen's social and economic concerns, and how it informs his theatrical techniques, are largely unexplored. Moreover, Tornqvist's somewhat unnuanced fixation on this dichotomy contributes to a literary emphasis that doesn'tlend itself to conveying a sense of Ibsen's work in production. In both sections, however, Tornqvist's examination of the plays is mostly conventional script analysis, focusing on structure, characterization. theme. and imagery; and his analyses of the television productions are as much concerned with the interpretative choices made as with an active working of the Reviews 143 semiotic frame. His main concern is the relationship of these choices to the underlying text, not their relationship to media. There is little to distinguish Ihe directorial choices he calls our attention to in the television productions from those that might be made in a stage production. As a resuit, Ihe most potent theoretical possibilities that he raises are left to readers to develop on theirown. Take the final paragraph of the preface, for example, which both closes down and opens up a potentially powerful historicization of media and theatrical style: By limiting Imyl examination to TV presenlations of plays wrillen for the stage, comparability lof texts and productions! is increased - especially since all the plays were composed in the same relatively short period by merely two dramatists, who could both be seen as ancestors of the intimate realism characteristic of television drama. The realism, orbelterillusionism, that in Ibsen's and Strindberg's time dominated the stage has, with the arrival of the screen media, come to be associated with these media - whereas the stage has come to be seen as a place where stylisation. non-illusionism, should reign supreme. Paradoxically, the more or less mimetic kind of presentation intended by the two Scandinavians is nowadays largely taken care of in media that existed hardly (film) ornot at all...

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