A theater director leaves more footnotes than footprints.
In 50 years time, Jerome Robbins will not be remembered as the director of “Fiddler on the Roof” but as the choreographer of innumerable ballets still in repertories throughout the world.
It will be much the same for Ingmar Bergman, who will be remembered for his movies, while his achievements as a stage director will be overshadowed.
So, if it’s immortality you’re after, leave solid behind tangible works. The work of a stage director is as vaporous as smoke, eventually dissolving into thin air.
These thoughts were prompted by the recent appearance of the Royal Swedish Dramatic Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, in Bergman’s magical staging of August Strindberg’s “The Ghost Sonata.”
I encountered Bergman first as a film writer (he wrote the screenplay for “Torment,” Alf Sjoberg’s haunting 1944 masterpiece) and then, of course, as one of the world’s most admired film directors.
Later, he became a director for the stage. And – this may sound heresy – but I suspect the stage is his true milieu. This is not to discount his movie work by one whit. Movies such as “Wild Strawberries” and many, many others will be his heritage.
But with the instant immediacy of the stage, he shows a hair-trigger subtlety that even the movies don’t quite match.
I think the first Bergman staged play I saw was in English, at Britain’s National Theater, and had an unlikely but marvelous Maggie Smith in “Hedda Gabler.” This was a revelation in insight: He worked his way into Hedda’s mind like a poetically inclined brain surgeon.
My next experience of Bergman came a few years later in Copenhagen, where I saw the Danish Royal Theater give Moliere’s “Le Misanthrope.”
I can’t even order a cup of coffee and a Danish in Danish, but Moliere’s play became a strange dream of clarity, with every nuance slipping into place and vocal inflections and the odd close-up of transitory expressions all adding up to a Moliere I had never really seen before.
Then, to the New York theater and my great good fortune, Bergman and his Stockholm team of actors struck up a regular relationship with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, giving us this 10-year window on Bergman’s art.
So what is it in general that Bergman brings to the theater? Ironically, I think it might well be the skills he cultivated as a filmmaker.
Movies appear to have taught him two things: the absolute importance of atmosphere and also of a story progressing from character to character, from look to look, often from close-up to close-up.
Part of his skill is careful lighting and settings. Part of it, I suspect, is getting the actors to capture an altogether remarkable degree of concentration, permitting them actually to move emotionally in and out of the play’s focus.
In a Bergman production, you always know where to look – it’s like a game of tennis. And you always know what to watch – it’s like a game of chess.
And both games are being played by a genius.