Word: bergmans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This dreamlike visual overture is a stroke worthy of that renowned master of the cinematic art, Ingmar Bergman. And no wonder. The Hedda unveiled by the National Theater troupe last week is a special restaging by Bergman of his 1968 Stockholm production. In it, the play moves out of the sitting room and into the psyche. Bergman's stage is relatively bare and expressionistic, luridly lit when it is not dark. On the peripheries of many of his scenes, characters who are supposed to be offstage linger to eavesdrop on the proceedings that concern them. Somewhat eerily, this shifts...
...pale, strained face is a screen on which the shadow of one inner demon masters another, only to be mastered by a third. In keeping with the cinematically fluid rhythms of the production, Miss Smith cuts and dissolves from mood to mood like some dazzling montage sequence in a Bergman film. The wonder of it is that this is not a film, but stage art transmuted to a new dimension...
Originality must be purchased, artistically speaking. For Bergman, the cost of replacing the traditional Victorian furnishings with a more symbolic setting is a tendency toward abstractness. For Miss Smith, the cost of replacing the outwardly thwarted new woman of Hedda's day with a more inwardly racked characterization is a slight taint of the clinical case history. But both transactions are bargains. In place of Ibsen's now somewhat dated "modernity," Bergman's and Miss Smith's theatricality seems timelessly contemporary...
Libby Meredith (Ingrid Bergman) is bored. Her professorial husband Roger (Fritz Weaver) is a pedant who sprinkles even casual conversation with chalk dust. On Roger's sabbatical, the Merediths flee New York for a Tennessee farm. But while Roger is examining constitutional law, Libby sets to work fracturing some commandments. For lurking in the barn is the local satyr, Will Cade (Anthony Quinn). "I'm a grandmother," protests Libby at first. "There's a lot of woman left in ya," grunts Will...
What does it matter if Anthony Quinn's ersatz Tennessee accent makes him seem the subject of the Scopes trial? Who cares if Ingrid Bergman's good Swedish bones and wholly preserved beauty are squandered? Grandmothers are people too. And Alexander Portnoy isn't the only one with fantasies...