Makten och ensamheten: Studier i Lars Forsseils historiedramatik by Gunnar Syréhn (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 499 GUNNAR SYRtHN. Maktenoch ensamheten: Studier i Lars Forssells historiedramatik (Power and Loneliness: A Study of Lars Forssell's Historical Drama). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1985. pp. 253, illustrated. S.kr. lI8. Although still unfamiliar to most readers and theatregoers on this side ofthe Atlantic, th~ plays ofLars Forssell have continued to provide the contemporary Swedish theatre with some of its most imaginative and challenging productions. Like his better-known countryman Per Olov Enqvist, Forssell has often turned for subject matter to "real" figures of history and literature, depicting them - in a manner quite unlike Enqvist's with a blend of lyrical exuberance and ironic distance. Throughout his career, there has been a tendency in some quarters to regard Forssell primarily as a lyric poet, dabbling in drama as a sideline. He himself takes vigorous exception to this view, however, and .Gunnar Syrehn's new book (like his earlier Forssell study, Osiikerhetens teater) rightly makes a strong case for the intrinsic theatricality ofthis writer's work. This book offers a detailed critical·introduction to Forssell's three major historical dramas, approaching each ofthemessentially as a text for the theatre, "the basis, or the score, for a future stage performance." In Galepannan (The Madcap, 1964), the play's title character and controlling consciousness is the luckless Gustav IV Adolf, the Swedish king imprisoned and deposed by his officers as a result ofhis stubborn opposition to Napoleon in 18°9. From the public house in St. Gallen where we first encounter him, the audience follows the exiled monarch - a divided spirit, born in the wrong age, trapped in the kingly role that has been "forced" upon him - back through the chronicle· of his life and his mistakes. Wordsworth viewed the historical Gustav Adolf as an heroic spokesman for truth ("Call not the royal Swede unfortunate"), and Victor Hugo likewise saw him as a symbol of liberty. By contrast, Forssell's portrayal emphasizes the tragicomic alienation and "atonality" of a figure beset by irreconcilable inner contradictions, suffering from his inability to comprehend his existence. Syrehn explores several points of comparison with Shakespeare (in the use of songs and the concept of the wise fool), with Strindberg's own history plays, and with Brecht (again in the songs and in the use of dramatized history as a critical and dialectical perspective on moral issues). Most striking, however, is the influence of Chaplin and his films - about which Forssell himself has in fact published a book. The Madcap is a Chaplinade, its central character the tragicomic scapegoat who strives desperately to maintain his dignity in a bewildering world. A production ofthe play corresponding with Forssell's intentions should, Syrehn maintains, "bear a certain resemblance to Chaplin's films" (p. 216). The most direct parallel: The Great Dictator (1940). Playwrights and filmmakers alike have been drawn to the strangely dramatic history of Queen Christina, the young Swedish ruler who, after only five years on the throne, abdicated her crown in 1655, impulsively embraced Catholicism, and spent the last decades of her life in self-imposed exile in Rome. The genesis of Forssell's Christina ALexandra (1968) was evidently a commissioned filmscript, Les sept visages de La reine 500 Book Reviews Christine, which Ingmar Bergman might perhaps have directed iffunding for the project had not dried up. The play itself retains a certain "cinematic" quality - a dreamlike atmosphere offluctuating, kaleidoscopic reality, shaped by the subjective perspective of the dreamer-egoist Christina. The parallel which Syrehn draws to Strindberg's A Dream Play is entirely apt. In addition, the influence of Strindberg's historical drama Kristina (190I) is also felt, especially in Forssell's preoccupation with the vacillating mUltiplicity of his central character's personality. The scope of Forssell's play is, however, considerably broader than Strindberg's. His oneiric chronicle seeks to reveal the conflicting "faces" of Christina, from the innocence (and the irresponsibility) of the child to the cruelty, coldness, and loneliness of the old woman she becomes. Like Gustav Adolf, this frustrated, power-deformed figure represents, for Forssell, an example of the "ideal role," composed of jagged, clashing polarities and ambiguities that contribute to this playwright's vision ofan "atonal," genreless theatre - a "theatre...