“I can exist without making films, but I cannot exist without making theatre” said Ingmar Bergman, who is entering the Repertoire with this production, in the year marking the hundredth anniversary of his birth. While he is known as a filmmaker, people are less aware that he was also an immense man of theatre.
Fanny and Alexander, which he considered to be his testamentary work, first appeared in a novelised form before being directed for television and then adapted for cinema. It is this hybrid material that Julie Deliquet takes hold of. After the success of her staging of Vania, she is reunited with the actors of the Comédie-Française for this sweeping epic on the life of a theatrical family. In a Salle Richelieu transposed to the beginning of the twentieth century, she invites them to the Ekdhals’ Christmas party.
Oscar, Helena Ekdhal’s son, has taken over the management of the theatre from his mother. After his sudden death, his wife Émilie, also an actress, seems to find a way of restoring meaning to her existence in the person of the Lutheran bishop Edvard Vergerus. From then on, her life and that of her two children, Fanny and Alexandre, suffer under the mental violence to which this severe man subjects them. From Alexandre, an autobiographical figure who resists religious authority with the innocence of his age and the firmness of a spirit devoted to imagination, to all the members of the family, the characters offer Julie Deliquet a partition on themes that are dear to her: the family, the couple, death and generational conflict. She presents an ensemble piece infused with Bergman’s thoughts on theatre, a tribute to this art, to its magic and its necessity.

NEW PRODUCTION
REPERTOIRE ENTRY

— Lire notre entretien avec Julie Deliquet
— Retrouvez les citations de la pièce déclinées sur les objets de la boutique et le texte d'Ingmar Bergman ici

BERGMAN RECOGNISES THAT THEATRE has a primary function in his work stating that “I can exist without making films. But I can’t exist without making theatre” or “Theatre is my profession, cinema is my vocation”. This double career started at an early age, with the puppet theatre he played with as a child, like the little boy in Fanny and Alexander, or in the visit of a film studio when he was a teenager. Theatrical and cinematographic activities were intertwined for Bergman, even more so than for Visconti: the same troupe of actors, the same effects of quotations from one art to another. From 1938 to 2002, he made some forty films and staged more than one hundred plays, alternating between positions as artistic director of the Helsingborg Municipal Theatre and of the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm (the Dramaten), while also working in Gothenburg, Malmö and Munich. His productions toured all around the world.

Bergman staged his own plays as well as a vast range of authors. While he didn’t hide his predilection for Strindberg, his compatriot, his eclectic repertoire also broadly encompassed world dramatic literature: Ibsen, Peter Weiss, Pirandello, O’Neill, Ostrovsky, Büchner, Gombrowicz, Tabori, Botho Strauss, Mishima, Camus, Anouilh, Goethe, Tennessee Williams, Garcia Lorca, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Brecht... and Molière, whom he admired above all.

His vision of the stage was strongly influenced by his practice of framing film shots: he grouped the actors, asked them to address the audience, as they would in front of the camera, he sculpted the bodies with lighting that focused the action.

In an iconoclastic approach, he mixed periods in the same production, while returning to the fundamentals of the “historical” stage: evoking the architecture of the Globe Theatre for Shakespeare, using chandeliers and oil lamps from the classical period for Molière, casting a man in the role of Madame Pernelle in Tartuffe, as had been done when the play was first performed. Accustomed to the collage/editing techniques of filmmaking, he didn’t hesitate to manipulate the text to make his own interpretation more forceful. Thus, for example, he moved Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” monologue to the middle of scene with the players.

Throughout his career, he increasingly stripped back his aesthetic, restricting the performance space, reducing the stage to a simple trestle, or placing the actors in sight between their scenes to maintain a link and tension with the audience. The latter technique drew inspiration from an architectural feature of the Salle Richelieu known as the “foyer des travestissements” [the chamber of transformations]: a space close to the stage where the actors change or rest without breaking the link with the stage.

Bibliography: Odette Aslan, Ingmar Bergman, introduction et choix de textes, Actes Sud-papiers, collection “Mettre en scène”, 2012. Odette Aslan, “Ingmar Bergman metteur en scène et auteur”, in Revue d’histoire du théâtre, 2015-III, no. 267, p. 451-463.

• Visual: Le Retour d’Ulysse, scenario by Jules Lemaître, 1908, “The Academy and the Comédie working for the cinematographer”

Translation: Lucie Albertini et Carl Gustaf Bjurström
Scenic version: Florence Seyvos, Julie Deliquet et Julie André
Directed by : Julie Deliquet
Scenography**:** Éric Ruf et Julie Deliquet
Costumes: Julie Scobeltzine
Light: Vyara Stefanova
Original music : Mathieu Boccaren
Artistic collaboration**:** Julie André
Assistant scenography: Zoé Pautet