Ingrid and I saw 1984 at Stadsteatern.

During much of the performance, sound was provided through headphones. It felt odd and kind of gimmicky at first, but it also worked. Winston’s quiet musings and diary entries could be delivered quietly, intimately. And the subtle hints of there being someone else there, prompting him and asking questions, also worked because these sounds could be subtle, barely there. A whisper is no longer a whisper if it is delivered through a loudspeaker, or by an actor projecting his voice through a hall.

Otherwise: intense, minimal, true to the original. (To the extent that I remember the original, which I last read, oh, thirty years ago?)

Sweeney Todd at the Royal Opera. Technically a musical, which is nice, because it made the whole thing sound more pop-culture-ish and got the kids to join, but really, what makes this a musical rather than an opera?

I was most impressed by the work of the dialect coach, because Ms Lovett sounded as British as could be, and so did the others.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stadsteatern. This time the actual Shakespeare play, not a ballet, and this time the whole family went. Eric and I obviously knew roughly what we were in for; Ingrid enjoyed it; Adrian was mostly restless and not particularly spell-bound.

I found it all pleasantly modern while still true to the spirit of the original. (No microphones!) And of course Shakespeare would have wanted battery-driven hobby horses for his actors, if he had had access to them.

I will remember the wonderfully zany costumes. A bizarre mixture of fashion from Shakespeare’s era (ruff collars and puffy knee-length trousers) and Greek-themed decorations. Lysander and Demetrius wore sweatshirts, one a souvenir shirt from Athens and the other with University of Athens branding. Exaggerated face paintings reminded me of the masks used in Greek tragedies.

There were no photos allowed during the performance of course, so the photos below are official press photos from Stadsteatern.

Danse Macabre at Kulturhuset. A mixture of theatre, dance and circus.

This was the weirdest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

The scene was covered in garbage. At the rear, a large construction consisting of a steep hill of sorts, and a box/room/house balancing on top of it. The box/room/house was often but not always tilting quite steeply left and right at a constant pace.

On the plus side, three of the people on the scene were really skilled as both actors, dancers and acrobats (and one of them as a singer). The fourth one seemed to be a bit of a filler, with not much to do and not much skill either – later I found out he was the director. I guess he wanted to stand on the scene, too.

The performance itself was a jumbled mixture of all imaginable things. I couldn’t discern any consistent theme or tone. It was so wildly inconsistent that the surprises stopped being surprising and interesting and just made me roll my eyes. It was as if the director/choreographer had just thrown in everything he could think of. Childish, and not in the sense of unbridled creativity, but more like “look at me being all crazy, now you all have to laugh at me”. And most of these fancies were abandoned soon after their introduction. Nothing actually went anywhere.

“Let’s put the dancers in a tilting box and let them hang off the walls! Let’s give the old guy a silly voice like a whiny kid! Let’s pretend he doesn’t know how to put on a shoe! Let’s make the long-haired actors hang their hair in front of their faces so we can’t see them! Let’s make the guy sing! Let’s make the guy give birth to a bundle of clothes, with really realistic groans and screams! Let’s have the small girl get inside an XXL hoodie and put the wrong body part out of the wrong opening! Let’s give the skeleton guy a pair of fake legs to hold so it looks like he has four legs! Let’s make them all stuff garbage inside their clothes! Look at us being so funny and unpredictable!”

I was yawning by the end of it, and so were the people next to me. At the end, the cast were clapping their hands to pull more applause out of the not-very-impressed audience.

The two parts that I actually appreciated were Dimitri Jourde’s singing, and the dancing inside the tilting box, which contained both actual development and progression and plenty of skill.

“Coraline” is great as a book, a movie, and a comic book. Why not an opera?

In terms of story, the opera version at Folkoperan was true to the original. The scene decorations and costumes all had the right kind of eerie mood, and the buttons-for-eyes looked truly creepy.

The problem was the singing.

This performance left me more convinced than ever that I just do not get opera. I would have liked the show so much more if they had just stopped singing and talked like normal people.

Opera singing is simply weird, and this opera was weirder than many, I think. The music was not just atonal but also a-structural. I couldn’t discern any melody or musical theme at all in what the orchestra played and the singers sang. The orchestral music felt like a vague soundscape more than anything. And the singing literally seemed like something that a kid could have made up when pretending to sing opera. Just make your voice really high and stretch out each word! Look, ma, I’m doing opera!

One of my birthday presents this year was a ticket to see Bortbytingen (“The changeling”) at Dramaten with Ingrid.

The play was based on a short story by Selma Lagerlöf, who is one of my favourite non-sci-fi writers, and one of a very few Swedish writers I like.

A human child was taken by trolls and a troll child left in its place. The troll has grown up with humans, hated and despised by all of them. The mother, too, hates and despises it and longs for her own baby, soft and pink and beautiful, but still feels some responsibility for the ugly thing and cannot bring herself to stop taking care of it, much less kill it. It’s breaking her and her husband and their marriage.

The troll meanwhile is as unhappy as its “parents”. How much should it suppress its nature to fit in? How much of an effort should it make to drink the nauseating milk and eat the disgusting bread? Would it be better to leave the “mother” he loves and see if he fits in better with the trolls in the dark, scary forest?

I loved all parts of this play. The story, the small venue, the minimalist stage design, the simple acting, the folk songs woven into it. I’ve often found Swedish theatre performances overly dramatic and been disappointed in the quality of the acting. This play was truly a pleasant surprise.

Notes for the future:
Written by Sara Bergmark Elfgren, directed by Tobias Theorell. Actors I liked: Maia Hansson Bergqvist, Maria Salomaa.

We went to the theatre yesterday and saw Mio, min Mio at Stadsteatern. It’s been about 30 years since I last read the book so I watched it with fresh eyes.

The previous children’s/family theatre shows at Stadsteatern have been well worth seeing – we’ve seen Ronja Rövardotter as well as Momo (which apparently I never wrote about). This one was no exception.

The scenography was simple – a lot was achieved with simply light and shadow. The Faraway Land was a bit bland, perhaps, and so was the acting during the first half of the play, with more reciting than true feeling. The real focus was on the dark places that Mio traveled through, and those were truly dark and dreary. An intense and serious version of this story, rather than an adventurous one.

I like modern circus. I like Philip Glass. I don’t particularly like opera, but I’m willing to listen to it if I get circus and Philip Glass to compensate.

We saw Philip Glass’ opera Satyagraha at Folkoperan. They combined the opera with a circus performance by Cirkus Cirkör. A surprising combination that worked surprisingly well: the two complemented each other, and the combination never felt forced. Performances of minimalist music can benefit some kind of visual complement – I’m thinking of Koyaanisqatsi for example.

Satyagraha deals with the early life of Mahatma Gandhi and the beginnings of his theory of non-violent resistance. Each circus act fit into the story and illustrated each scene much more tangibly than the music could possibly do. Balancing on a tightrope to symbolize passage through an annoyed crowd. a teeterboard act to illustrate a battle, etc.

Even so the performance was relatively… vague. Not concrete. It consisted not so much of events from those years in Gandhi’s life, as interpretations of feelings and associations around those events.

I wonder how much sense the opera would even make on its own. Probably not much at all, given that it is in sanskrit. But then again I don’t suppose “sense” is what opera-goers want and expect from opera performances.

Threads, nets and knitting have been recurring themes in Cirkus Cirkör’s performances in recent years, and they were part of this performance as well. It sounds gimmicky but again it worked really well.

The final scene initially made no sense to me but made a strong impression. Six actors walked in a circle, taking turns to push a giant wheel, thereby winding rope on it. A seventh actor guided the rope. It went on for a long time. Combined with the music, which for this scene was particularly minimalistic, the effect was hypnotic. I thought it mostly symbolic. Only later did I connect this wheel to the spinning wheel on India’s flag, and learn that spinning was an important part of Gandhi’s later politics in India.

The opera on its own would probably not have been enough to keep me interested for 2+ hours, and the circus acts were not impressive enough to fill a whole evening either. But the two together made for an interesting and memorable performance.

More culture! Ingrid and I went to the theatre and saw Ronja Rövardotter at Stadsteatern. Here we are waiting for the performance to begin.

This was Ronja with a steampunk flavour. A dazzling show with spectacular costumes, smoke and thunder, dance and acrobatics and two DJs delivering wild music – and yet well balanced so the effects never stole the attention from Ronja and her story. Spellbinding for both Ingrid and myself.

We had a girls’ night out at the theatre, Ingrid, myself and my mum. We saw The Wizard of Oz at Maximteatern. The show was pretty good. Nice costumes, clever scenography (with pages in a giant book providing all the different backdrops), lots of singing and dancing. Visually I thought it was bit unimaginative to mimic the look of the movie so closely, but I guess it’s such a classic that for many people Dorothy needs to look like Judy Garland or it won’t be Dorothy.