Ein Midsummer Night’s Nightmare by the Sea. Water in all its forms: flowing over the ground as a nighttime mist, swaying in the bronze-gold morning light, brought in as a shower by the storm wind and then immediately carried away again. There are also sounds – drifting, alienated fragments of songs, sounds of nature, radio and TV broadcasts – and colors: the vibrant orange of a remembered orgy, the damp blue-violet of the guilt that follows.
Seascape by Turner
Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s feature film “Persona” from 1966 sticks in the memory as a series of impressions: fluidity, musicality, a feeling of lightness, despite the weight of the material – a celebrated actress suddenly falls into complete silence, comes into being medical treatment, seeks to recover under the care of a young nurse on a deserted island. But between dream and reality, play and seriousness, a lot of things fluctuate. If Bergman’s black and white film resembles an aquatint by Odilon Redon, van Hove’s adaptation evokes a seascape by Turner.
The graphic-enigmatic nature of the original – close-up shots of faces on the formal level, a mise en abyme of cinematography on the substantive level – cannot be reproduced well on stage. Van Hove, close to the script, makes the material his own using genuinely dramatic means. That means, in addition to the anti-naturalistic lighting design and the magical set design by decades-long creative partner Jan Versweyveld – a gray psychiatric prison that is transformed in an instant into a sun deck surrounded by water – and, above all, the mutual give and take with astonishing actors.
Tense nerve rope
First and foremost with Justine Bachelet in the role of the nurse once played by Bibi Andersson: a child of nature whose seemingly still waters hide turbulent abysses. The young actress, who had already aroused admiration in van Hove’s production of Tennessee Williams’ “Glass Menagerie” in 2020 not after but alongside Isabelle Huppert, captivates with her very own kind of inwardness: tomboyish, childishly pouting, sitting on you to the point of tearing balancing a taut rope of nerves.
In “Persona” she is accompanied by Elizabeth Mazev as a disturbingly distant doctor and Emmanuelle Bercot and Charles Berling in a silent role. The latter two also star alongside Bachelet in “Après la répétition”, the adaptation of Bergman’s late television film “After the Rehearsal” (1984), which opens the three-hour evening. An aging director and a young actress, in the evening in the wings of an otherwise deserted theater: He desires her (not just sensually), she needs him (not just professionally). The shadow of a faded stage star moves between the two: the former lover of one and mother of the other. Bercot, skin-tight jeans, knee-high boots and a baggy sweater with too low a neckline, plays the wreck who begs the director for some love and a leading role with a fascinating range of expressions.
Bachelet and Berling, in contrast, initially have less rewarding roles. But then Bergman – and with him van Hove – strikes a surprising chord: he lets the veteran director and the young actress outline their yet-to-be-started affair in a dialogue that soon becomes heated. Van Hove immerses this scene in the dim light of a table lamp and lets the titles of Scott Walker songs zapped on the work laptop summarize the stages of the relationship that has been talked about in the bud.
The two models adapted for the double program have a lot in common: the focus on the art of acting, on the dichotomy of reality and appearance, and on the difficulty of playing the role of mother. Van Hove combines “After the Rehearsal” and “Persona” by casting them with the same actors (except for Mazev) and even using a prop here and there, a metal table. The soon-to-be head of the Ruhrtriennale, who is known for his adaptations of films, is characterized by the cinematographic efficiency of his productions – from the systematic use of microports for better understanding of the text to the soundtrack that underlines moods and the live camera that captures body images. and facial expressions enlarged. Van Hove’s productions often turn out to be a bit lacking in dross. In “Après la répétition/Persona”, however, the chamber play format promotes condensation.
The remake of a Dutch-language production from 2012 with French actors is the current highlight of the start of the season at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. After being closed for seven years for a total renovation, the historic three-division building was reopened in September in a state-of-the-art state. The entrance hall, freed from two central staircases and surrounded by new glass mezzanines with light parquet floors, appears incredibly light and spacious compared to before.
The underside of the concrete shell, built in 1968, rises towards the hall like a monumental concrete sculpture, which supports the – today 932 – seats with a revolutionary level of visibility at the time. A domed hall under the roof with the same floor space as the almost three hundred square meter stage now hosts performances in front of up to one hundred and thirty spectators. The building itself was renamed “Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt” in honor of its illustrious director between 1899 and 1923. The large hall could one day bear the name of the most famous propagator of dance theater, who has been closely associated with the house since 1979: Pina Bausch.
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