STOCKHOLM — Ingmar Bergman’s ghostly presence permeates the Royal Dramatic Theater here, where he directed dozens of plays over decades. So much so that when I got stuck in an elevator for 30 minutes after a backstage tour, I felt as if I were in an immersive production of one of his claustrophobic dramas. Who among our stranded group, I wondered, would have an existential crisis?
We waited. Finally, a young Chinese student quipped, rather appropriately, “God’s silence.”
I was in town for the fourth edition of the city’s Ingmar Bergman International Theater Festival, which has been honoring the master in ways obvious and not since 2009. Dramaten, as the Royal Dramatic Theater is commonly known, made for a fitting base: Bergman directed his first play at the grand Art Nouveau building in 1951 and his last in 2002; he also served as artistic director between 1963 and 1966.
For a big swath of this period Bergman was, of course, also an undisputed kingpin of art-house cinema. In such films as “The Seventh Seal,” “Persona” and “Cries and Whispers,” the Swedish director depicted spiritual crises and tormented relationships that were catnip to viewers craving meaning. Austerely chic landscapes, frank sexuality and close-ups of strikingly beautiful women did not hurt, either.
Just over a decade after Bergman’s death in 2007, his aura still looms large. At home, he is part of the furniture: Since 2015 his face has been on the 200-kronor note, which is a pretty big deal even if the 20-something employee who turned down my bill at a cashless cafe had no idea who he was.
And the centennial of his birth this year has prompted a slew of tributes and exhibitions, from São Paulo to Montreal, Haifa to Milwaukee. New Yorkers will be able to enjoy a pair of rare feature films focusing on theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Sept. 17 and a movie series at Scandinavia House in Manhattan starting Sept. 26.
The 11-day theater festival, which concluded Sept. 2, introduced an estimated 10,000 committed audience members to seven local premieres and nine imports. This wasn’t Comic-Con: The tasteful merchandise came in only two colors, black and white, and sadly, I did not witness any instances of Bergman cosplay.
But stage fireworks came courtesy of such leading directors as Ivo van Hove of Belgium, Simon Stone of Australia and Falk Richter from Germany.
“We decided that 50 percent of the titles should be somehow [related to] Bergman, either a movie or a book or something, and 50 percent should be contemporary theater,” said the festival’s artistic director, Eirik Stubo, 53, explaining the ecumenical programming. “It was important to have the opportunity to see something you could not otherwise see in Stockholm.”
The approaches were refreshingly broad, from “Dancing with Bergman,” co-choreographed by Mats Ek, to Jörgen Dahlqvist’s “The Last Child,” a zippy show for young audiences that boasted references to “The Seventh Seal” and the pop singer Zara Larsson.
Oddly for such an amiably goofy piece, there were no children at the 11 a.m. performance I attended. Perhaps their parents could not imagine anything even vaguely related to Bergman could be fun?
The Brazilian composer João MacDowell was more direct in his admiration for “The Seventh Seal,” adapting it into an opera that had its premiere at the festival in a concert version.
In other instances, the Bergman connection to the festival roster was nebulous at best. “Hearing,” written and directed by Amir Reza Koohestani of Iran, is a taut quasi-thriller partly set in a boarding school for girls in Tehran. The production provides rare insights into a theatrical scene that is not well known to Western theatergoers, but it can hardly be deemed Bergmanesque, or even Bergman-adjacent.
“One Night in the Swedish Summer” came to the festival in a roundabout manner. Its author was the actor-turned-playwright Erland Josephson, a longtime member of Bergman’s regular ensemble and his successor as Dramaten’s artistic director. (He died in 2012.) The show added another layer by being about a filmmaker Bergman influenced, and very much admired, Andrei Tarkovsky.
The drama recounts Josephson’s experience on the set of the 1986 Tarkovsky film “The Sacrifice,” a shoot hampered by the language barrier between the Swedish team and the Russian director.
The show, which was directed by Mr. Stubo and took place at Elverket, a Dramaten venue housed off-site in a vast former industrial space, explores how communication can break down among artists.
There is even humor — or what qualifies as humor in a play revolving around Tarkovsky — as the barely fictionalized characters wait for the unnamed director to find the exact right light. The tone was affectionate, but I could not help wishing the play had been about Josephson’s relationship with Bergman instead.
Staying faithful to the theater.
Unlike Orson Welles or Elia Kazan, other influential directors who started in theater, Bergman stayed the course, directing 60 features for cinema and television and about 150 plays. In a typical year he would oversee two shows, then shoot during the summer, often with the same actors. (The Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted a dozen Bergman-directed productions between “Hamlet” in 1988 and “Ghosts” in 2003.)
“Most non-Swedes don’t know that he made much more theater than films,” said Jan Holmberg, 47, who runs the Ingmar Bergman Foundation. “He regarded theater as the faithful wife and cinema as the exciting mistress — and he would always return to the wife.”
Which is not to say that theater was a predictable comfort zone for Bergman, who after all was married five times. Although he claimed, for instance, that he only wanted to honor a playwright’s work, he often meddled with the scripts — his “Ghosts” interpolated Ibsen’s text with some Strindberg.
The latter, a fellow Scandinavian moralist and explorer of tortured psyches, was a major influence on Bergman, who staged his plays repeatedly over his career. No wonder, then that he was at the heart of a festival highlight — Mr. Stone’s memorable, four-and-a-half-hour “Hotel Strindberg.”
As with his Lorca update, “Yerma,” Mr. Stone recontextualizes a classic playwright’s themes and characters in a desperately bleak contemporary setting. Also as in “Yerma,” the set — this time an oversize “Hollywood Squares”-like grid — plays an integral part and the show builds up to a nerve-shattering meltdown, in this case by the great German actor Martin Wuttke.
The play introduces couples in various rooms and in various states of disarray. They come together and come undone, make love and argue. The show is a blistering dive into the horrors of relationships, and it works even if you can’t tell your “Miss Julie” from your “Dance of Death.”
It could be hard to take — there were several walkouts — but it has wormed itself into my head.
The slippery borders between life and art.
The first thing you see when you enter “Bergman — Truth and Lies,” an exhibition at the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts around the corner from the festival, is a photo of the young Alexander from” “Fanny and Alexander,” the director’s 1982 family drama.
He is looking at a miniature puppet theater — a direct reference to Bergman’s playing with a similar toy when he was a child. The entire exhibition (which was organized by one of Bergman’s daughters-in-law and runs through Sept. 16) underlined the fascinating resonances between fact and fiction in Bergman’s body of work.
Unlike most of his other films, “Fanny and Alexander” is an audience-friendly, life-affirming spectacle. The Swedish department store NK used it as the inspiration for its holiday windows last year, and stage adaptations have become something of a Christmas tradition in Scandinavia. (The Old Vic in London presented its own version this spring, and another will premiere at the Comédie-Française in February.)
It’s that gray area between fact and fib that the Belgian companies tg STAN and de Roovers brilliantly explored in the festival entry “Infidèles,” which incorporates bits from the 1988 Bergman autobiography, “The Magic Lantern,” into “Faithless,” a script that was filmed in 2000 by Liv Ullmann.
“Infidèles” tracks the birth and collapse of an adulterous triangle involving a conductor, an actress and a director, and is tg STAN’s third Bergman adaptation following “After the Rehearsal” and “Scenes from a Marriage.”
Just after the show, the company’s co-founder, Frank Vercruyssen, spoke of Bergman’s prose as if it were a fine wine: “There’s a great mouthfeel to a writer who can express his love, his hate, his irony, his sarcasm, his empathy in lines that are made to be performed. It’s like Chekhov or Schnitzler.”
A full circle return to the stage.
Unless you count tributes like, say, Woody Allen’s unintentionally funny “Interiors” or Paul Schrader’s recent “First Reformed,” which borrows heavily from 1963’s “Winter Light,” Bergman’s films have been more often spoofed and satirized than remade. He has few obvious cinematic heirs.
Ironically, it’s at the theater that his vision is most vividly preserved. Both his films and his unfilmed screenplays seep into the performing arts with regularity.
Besides an often stylized writing style that lends itself well to the stage, Bergman’s filmography is a repository of great roles for women. Just as important in our era of tight budgets, many of his works are chamber pieces with few characters.
The screen-to-stage phenomenon was represented at the Dramaten festival with Mr. MacDowell’s “The Seventh Seal,” Mr. van Hove’s diptych “After the Rehearsal”/“Persona,” and Emil Graffman’s Expressionist take on “The Rite,” which niftily rendered the spooky mood of this obscure made-for-television feature from 1969.
Bergman did not allow others to adapt his films while he was alive, but he made the Bergman Foundation the holder of performing rights to his manuscripts — a signal that requests were welcome. Now the foundation grants 50 to 60 licenses a year, with “Autumn Sonata,” “Persona,” “Scenes from a Marriage” and “Fanny and Alexander” the most popular catalog items.
There has been a Siberian “Seventh Seal” transposed to a hippie van, and an Australian “Scenes from a Marriage” in which the actors tackling the harrowing tale of a dying relationship were a brave real-life couple.
“To be honest I thought it was ridiculous at first, that you couldn’t possibly improve the films,” Mr. Holmberg, the foundation’s head, said. “But then I saw a few [adaptations] and I turned. Like many true classics, his films need to be reinterpreted, remade, rethought with every new generation.”
“I’m absolutely convinced that he is here to stay in the theater,” Mr. Holmberg added. “A hundred years from now, I think he will still be recognized, but as a writer rather than as a filmmaker.”
