Scenes from a Marriage

Scenes from a Marriage

A carousel of closeness and separation, driven by love, desire, hatred, and marital duties.

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) was not only one of the most renowned film screenwriters and directors of the 20th century but also one of Sweden's most eminent theater directors. As he himself once said, he was married to the theater, while film was his mistress. With his distinctive introspective authorial poetics—giving rise to the term "Bergmanesque"—he directed more than fifty films and staged over a hundred theatrical productions. He was an unparalleled master of psychological drama, about whom Krzysztof Kieślowski remarked that he was probably the only film director to have spoken about the human soul as profoundly as Dostoevsky or Camus.

Growing up in an environment of bourgeois and religious determinism, Bergman never identified with these categories, maintaining from early childhood— as he describes in his autobiography The Magic Lantern—a critical distance, skepticism, and defiance. However, this does not mean that the fanatical religious upbringing by his pastor father, who punished every sin harshly and mercilessly, did not leave a mark on him. Just as his father wielded the rod without pity, Bergman himself relentlessly probed the dark corridors of the human soul, painstakingly searching for "absolute truths." Yet, much like his father or his father’s God, he was unable to grant his characters happiness, peace, or the comforting wholeness of the human spirit. Bergman’s body of work is almost inseparably tied to his own life—memories of childhood and youth, traumas, personal frustrations, suffering, guilt, and sharp self-criticism, as well as critique of others.

When writing the screenplay for the 1972 television series Scenes from a Marriage, which he envisioned as "a series of dialogues, nothing extraordinary," he drew from his own experiences in marriage with actress Liv Ullmann, with whom he was in a relationship from 1965 to 1970. As he himself wrote, he was guided by the "absolute fact that the bourgeois ideal of security corrupts people's emotional lives, undermines them, and fills them with fear." Despite its autobiographical elements, Bergman skillfully infused the drama with a universal struggle between genders, between spouses, and within the family. He placed the relationship between Marianne and Johan under a magnifying glass, observing how they drew closer and drifted apart, how their perspectives and emotional responses evolved over a decade, how they navigated a spectrum of emotions—love, exhilarating attraction, anger, jealousy, cold and selfish indifference, disappointment, and brutal honesty.

Following the immense success of the series, Bergman went on to create a feature film of the same name (which received numerous international accolades, including the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film) and a theatrical adaptation, which he personally directed in 1981 at the Theater im Marstall in Munich. In Scenes from a Marriage, Johan and Marianne allowed themselves to be brave, cowardly, happy, sad, angry, loving, confused, insecure, content, cunning, unpleasant, childish, cruel, unfathomable, magnificent, petty, physically affectionate, heartless, foolish, wretched, powerless—in short, quintessentially human.

This marital vivisection will be brought to life by the young and promising Carinthian-Slovenian director Mira Stadler, last year’s recipient of the stella22 award for a groundbreaking production, who collaborated with young theater artists at Vienna’s Burgtheater.

The performance is staged by arrangement with Josef Weinberger Limited, London, on behalf of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation (http://www.ingmarbergman.se"; target="_new" rel="noopener" data-start="3610" data-end="3630">www.ingmarbergman.se).

Copyright representation: Josef Weinberger Ltd. (http://www.josef-weinberger.com"; target="_new" rel="noopener" data-start="3687" data-end="3711">www.josef-weinberger.com).

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