Sá Ljóti; personal enemies?

When my parents came visiting last weekend we had, as usual, a discussion about theatre, and they told me a little story about when I was five years old, going to the theatre (where my dad is working) and seeing a quite bad version of Drottningens Juvelsmycke (Carl Jonas Love Almqvist) over and over and over again. My dad asked me why I wanted to come, and the little girl answered; “I like to watch them”.

 

Last week I sat just outside the rehearsal room, on the big carpet in Smiðaverkstæðinn, and wrote an application for a school, it took almost a week of stress and nervosity, but during that week I got company by one or two of the actors, at least once a day. They came out, sat down and took a brake from the heavy discussions and sometimes arguments. They explain it like the script it self is sucking them in, it have its own will. They are trying to find their way through it, and trying to make the script and the characters theirs... but the script really doesn’t allow any freedom. The play have been growing individually in their heads since fall, when we had two weeks of reading the play, and now they are trying to understand not just the script but each others pictures of the script as well. And then with a script that has its own will on top of that, I can understand that they feel helpless sometimes.

 Not being five anymore, but 25, still sitting and still enjoying watching them, have maybe brought another perspective into the interest of watching, it may sound strange, but the arguments and seeing what the arguments are leading, is for me really interesting, I might not have seen it when I was five, but I think this play is in a way born in the complexity of helplessness and frustration. And I don’t say that I don’t feel sorry for the actors, I can see that it really affects them, and they get very tired, but as the one sitting watching, I can see that this is really going somewhere, the play force them to get personal and they can’t hide behind anything but themselves, they are forced to be vulnerable. And that is fascinating! This play doesn’t allow any lies; it is honest in its surrealness. I think that we all have many me’s inside us, we could be any me and sometimes become our owns worst enemy, I mean to one level narcissus exist in all of us.

I see the arguments and discussions as something very positive, it creates something that is going to be seen later, an honesty. And like Erland Josephson said to Ingmar Bergman when his wife died and he was grieving that he might not ever see her again; “Bejaka det då!” (Recognize that feeling and use it!) I think that is exactly what the actors in a way are doing (even if they are forced in to it); they are taking it in and are using it! And they go personal with their many me’s!

Ingrid