Latest news with #AugustStrindberg
News24
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- News24
James Ngcobo pioneers a Brics cultural exchange in Moscow
Supplied The esteemed director says language barriers were not an issue. He becomes the first African director in a Brics initiative to give cultural exchanges theatrical form. Egypt, China, Argentina and other countries are on board as more ventures are in the pipeline. Early this month, veteran actor and Joburg Theatre's artistic director, James Ngcobo, directed Russian actors at the Theatre of Nations in Moscow, in an initiative by the Brics nations to elevate artistic bilaterals to creative platforms other than traditional dialogue. Ngcobo's co-director was Chinese, when the latter directed Russian actors in the Swedish classic, Miss Julie, making this a rich, multicultural affair. When nations of the world convene, it is commonly done in conferences or symposiums. Ngcobo says there's a need for the Brics block of nations to shape new cultural exchanges. Written in the 1880s, playwright August Strindberg's timeless masterpiece has been performed in theatres across the world. Ngcobo found himself on the Russian theatre's radar, bringing in the SA director to bring these cultural exchanges to life. "You know the way that I am. I'm always placing a veil over people, idealizing them. So I never see who they really are. I did that with her - Miss Julie - and was bound to be disappointed." --John Liv Ullmann's MISS JULIE (by August Strindberg) 2014 — Dominique Revue (@DominiqueRevue) November 19, 2019 When given the artistic freedom to choose his play, the director said he felt that this classic love story with its political elements had a distinct universality. This ensured that he and his cast aligned much quicker. Argentina, Egypt and China are among the countries seemingly in agreement with the sentiment that while trade discussions are critical, there is still room to incorporate other aspects. Asked to dissect the value of taking these exchanges out of conference rooms and give them an artistic form, Ngcobo said: 'Maybe they [the Russians] also thought that we talk too much and they were not interested in talking. They were interested in moving the concept forward and you do this by finding someone from a different country.' Supplied Ngcobo and his Chinese counterpart were the first directors to propel this initiative forward and the former is the first African director to take on this challenge. Taking this as an opportunity to remind the global market that African directors are global citizens, Ngcobo said he was intentional about not selecting a piece from SA. It's important for people to understand that we're not just African directors, we are directors in a universal space. You've seen my trajectory as a director. I've been very conscious about directing works from all over the world. I choose plays in such a way that I don't present as one-dimensional. James Ngcobo This cannot be disputed, as Ngcobo has staged multiple internationally acclaimed plays, showcasing his uncanny ability to make them relatable to his local audience while retaining their original essence. Among these is American poet and playwright Ntozake Shange's (whose given name is Paulette Williams) For Colored Girls, and Oleanna by internationally celebrated author and Tony award-nominated playwright, David Mamet. If you had to choose a cast member from For Colored Girls based on your favourite colour, which colour would you pick?🙈😍 #ForColoredGirlsSA #ForColorFavourite — Joburg Theatre (@joburgtheatre) January 13, 2024 While Miss Julie was only staged this month, the casting was done last year. Ngcobo said working with a translator in a different country was a new experience for him. However, the language and cultural barriers were not an issue because there are South African languages that he doesn't speak and would therefore also require a translator if he were to stage work in those languages. 'I looked at Russian as a mere language because I know the play very well and by the third week, I was not even looking at the English script,' he recalled. My set designer couldn't speak a word of English, but we worked like a dream. You then realise that we always create hurdles for ourselves that are based on language. Language can't be a hurdle. For me, this experience proved that theatre is not about a language. It's a human condition, it's about emotions and, this is what I was directing. James Ngcobo More exchanges are in the pipeline as the Brics nations are determined to explore and develop this initiative. Ngcobo said he felt honoured to create this bridge. Playwright Palesa Mazamisa, who is also cementing herself as a global director, steered the ship in this year's production of Patrice Lumumba's life story in the play Katanga at the Market Theatre. Mazamisa will be jetting off to Saint Petersburg in Russia soon. Her award-winning play, Shoes and Coups, has been translated into Russian and Mazamisa will be directing a reading of it.
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stellan Skarsgård on Ingmar Bergman: ‘The only person I know who cried when Hitler died'
Stellan Skarsgård has weighed in on famed director Ingmar Bergman's Nazi sympathies as a young adult. The actor was speaking at the Karlovy Vary film festival in the Czech Republic, where he was promoting Joachim Trier's film Sentimental Value, inspired by the late Swedish director. Skarsgård expressed his personal dislike of Bergman, with whom he worked on a 1986 stage production of August Strindberg's A Dream Play. 'Bergman was manipulative,' said the 74-year-old Swedish actor, as first reported by Variety. 'He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it, when he was manipulating others. He wasn't nice.' Bergman, who died in 2007 at the age of 89, spoke openly of his past sympathies for nazism while growing up in a rightwing Swedish family. In 1999, the director explained to Maria-Pia Boëthius, author of a book questioning Sweden's neutrality during the second world war, his positive feelings for Hitler after attending a Nazi rally during an exchange trip to Germany in 1934, at the age of 16. 'Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd,' he said. He added that his family put a photo of the fascist dictator next to his bed after, because 'the nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful.' The book also details how Bergman's brother and friends vandalized the house of a Jewish neighbor with swastikas – and that he was 'too cowardly' to raise objections to the attack. The director also acknowledged his past Nazi sympathies in his 1987 memoir The Magic Lantern: 'For many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.' He told Boëthius that he maintained support for the Nazis until the end of the war, when the exposure of Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust changed his views. 'When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open,' he said, 'I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.' Bergman went on to explore anguish over the horrors of war in such films as Winter Light, The Silence and Shame. This is not the first time Skarsgård has criticized Bergman openly – in a 2012 interview with the Guardian's Xan Brooks, Skarsgård said of Bergman: 'I didn't want him near my life.' 'My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy,' he said at Karlovy Vary. 'He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an asshole. Caravaggio was probably an asshole as well, but he did great paintings.' Sentimental Value, which premiered to rave reviews at May's Cannes film festival, is tipped for awards success later this year.
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stellan Skarsgård on Ingmar Bergman: ‘The only person I know who cried when Hitler died'
Stellan Skarsgård has weighed in on famed director Ingmar Bergman's Nazi sympathies as a young adult. The actor was speaking at the Karlovy Vary film festival in the Czech Republic, where he was promoting Joachim Trier's film Sentimental Value, inspired by the late Swedish director. Skarsgård expressed his personal dislike of Bergman, with whom he worked on a 1986 stage production of August Strindberg's A Dream Play. 'Bergman was manipulative,' said the 74-year-old Swedish actor, as first reported by Variety. 'He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it, when he was manipulating others. He wasn't nice.' Bergman, who died in 2007 at the age of 89, spoke openly of his past sympathies for nazism while growing up in a right-wing Swedish family. In 1999, the director explained to Maria-Pia Boëthius, author of a book questioning Sweden's neutrality during the second world war, his positive feelings for Hitler after attending a Nazi rally during an exchange trip to Germany in 1934, at the age of 16. 'Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd,' he said. He added that his family put a photo of the fascist dictator next to his bed after, because 'the nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful.' The book also details how Bergman's brother and friends vandalized the house of a Jewish neighbor with swastikas – and that he was 'too cowardly' to raise objections to the attack. The director also acknowledged his past Nazi sympathies in his 1987 memoir The Magic Lantern: 'For many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.' He told Boëthius that he maintained support for the Nazis until the end of the war, when the exposure of Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust changed his views. 'When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open,' he said, 'I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.' Bergman went on to explore anguish over the horrors of war in such films as Winter Light, The Silence and Shame. This is not the first time Skarsgård has criticized Bergman openly – in a 2012 interview with the Guardian's Xan Brooks, Skarsgård said of Bergman: 'I didn't want him near my life.' 'My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy,' he said at Karlovy Vary. 'He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an asshole. Caravaggio was probably an asshole as well, but he did great paintings.' Sentimental Value, which premiered to rave reviews at May's Cannes film festival, is tipped for awards success later this year.
Wall Street Journal
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Creditors' Review: Liev Schreiber's Master Manipulator
New York The Swedish playwright August Strindberg was long dead before the term passive-aggressive was first coined during World War II, subsequently to become so ubiquitous as to be rendered almost meaningless. But his 1889 play 'Creditors,' being revived off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre in a sharp and stimulating production, offers a master class in the psychological manipulation the term loosely describes.
New York Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Creditors' Review: Who Pays the Price for a Bankrupt Marriage?
If a man hates women but also everyone else, is he still a misogynist? I ask for an acquaintance: August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright whose three tempestuous marriages were not enough to exhaust his fury at wives, muses, temptresses and others. Also, it would seem, at himself. His excess of rage found its way into plays — 'Miss Julie' (1888) and 'The Dance of Death' (1900) are today the most famous — that feature male characters only slightly less awful than the women in their lives. That ought to be unbearable, and not just as an affront to feminism; his pox-on-both-your-genders cussedness can sometimes feel self-canceling as drama. Still, Strindberg sticks to the canon of European classics like a tick: ugly, bloodthirsty, alive. The contradiction is at its most vexing in 'Creditors,' a follow-up to 'Miss Julie' that flips the earlier play's love-triangle geometry so that one woman and two men stand at its vertexes instead of one man and two women. Believe me, two men are worse: The lone woman, in this case a writer named Tekla, is literally outmanned. When Adolph, her second husband — having fallen under the influence of Gustav, his new friend — prosecutes Tekla for the theft of his happiness, Strindberg barely allows a defense. That 'Creditors' is nevertheless wretchedly compelling has previously been sufficient to keep it onstage. Perhaps in a post-#MeToo age no longer. At any rate, the production that opened Sunday at the Minetta Lane Theater — starring Liev Schreiber as Gustav, Maggie Siff as Tekla and Justice Smith as Adolph, now called Adi — sets out to shift the play's balance of power and mostly succeeds. In Jen Silverman's thoroughgoing adaptation, Tekla is given full voice, and the men are finally held to account. The new version, set in a vague present, opens like the original in the parlor of an out-of-season seaside hotel. There, Adi, a young painter, and Gustav, a teacher of 'dead languages,' are discovered in the depths of a whiskey-enhanced discussion of women and art. At first idly, then with what appears to be solicitude, and finally with the glee of a cat cornering a mouse before killing it, Gustav pokes into Adi's professional failures, connecting them to Tekla's galling success. Having dumped her first husband after humiliating him in a popular roman à clef, what's to stop her from doing the same to her second? The author of dramedies that foreground women — among them 'The Roommate,' 'The Moors' and 'Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties' — Silverman is not about to let that wife-as-witch framing stand. Still, Strindberg's three-part structure, with its bear-trap teeth, is too ingenious to mess with. In the second part, Adi, empowered or perhaps just empoisoned by Gustav, confronts Tekla with his newfound and possibly bogus insights into what he had thought was a happy marriage. Because Smith is so sincere and appealing, his vulnerability reading as openness instead of petulance, we are at first willing to allow his line of thought. But this is where the adaptation begins a slow turn. As written, and as played quite winningly by Siff, Silverman's Tekla is neither a kitten nor a harridan. She is confident and positive and, quite obviously, in love with her husband, at least as she has known him until now. Still, alert to his newfound possessiveness and jealousy, which eventually expresses itself in an act of violence, she draws a line in the sand of their marriage. The act of violence, so viscerally damning, is not in the Strindberg. But the fragility of traditional marriage certainly is, and Silverman underlines it. Every feeling and its opposite are readily available to either partner, so that even a slight disruption of their equilibrium can result in wild swings toward loathing. Adi sputters; Tekla snarls. What he once loved in her, and vice versa, quickly becomes what neither can abide. Still, in this version, Tekla remains the more sensible spouse, far abler in dealing with disputes. Her strength is further tested when she is forced, in the third part, into a final face-off with Gustav, the expert underminer. In the Strindberg, Gustav is coolly victorious; he destroys Tekla emotionally and her husband physically. That's almost the reverse of what happens now, both in plot and tone. Not cool at all, Schreiber's fascinatingly peculiar Gustav is incandescent with wrath, but also deeply depressed. How Silverman uses this to argue for the antithesis of Strindbergian revenge makes for a weird if wonderfully surprising kicker. Some will complain that this 'Creditors' is therefore not Strindberg at all, that Silverman's alterations run directly counter to his intentions. Both statements are true, but I'm not sure why they have to be criticisms. Yes, something of the brisk inevitability of the original is lost in the revision's strengthening of Tekla and softening of the others, and yes, the dialogue leans occasionally into feminist sloganeering. There is even a nod toward a form of marriage that the original, even if it imagined it, could not have dramatized. But the play is, as Silverman pointedly puts it on the title page of the script, 'after Strindberg' — more than 135 years after. If it detracts from 'Creditors' or its bleak realism about men and women, no harm done; the original still exists. And if it instead enhances 'Creditors' for contemporary audiences and refutes a false idea about men and women, it may do some good. Certainly Ian Rickson's direction does. His 'Creditors' staging is as trenchant, smooth and unburdened by overproduction as is his concurrent staging of 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes' with Hugh Jackman and Ella Beatty. (The two shows alternate at the Minetta Lane through June 18.) The same design team — sets by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones, costumes by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, lighting by Isabella Byrd, sound by Mikaal Sulaiman — achieves a similar less-is-more effect, supporting the story without becoming the story. The understated visuals do for the eyes what the sonic hush (there are no microphones) does for the ears, forcing the audience to concentrate on the words and to find the spectacle within them. The specific merits of 'Creditors,' numerous though they are, are similarly in service to something larger. Like 'Sexual Misconduct,' it is part of an experiment called Audible x Together, which aims to reinvigorate the Off Broadway ideal of engaging theater with excellent actors for diverse audiences at reasonable prices. Though half of the 400 seats for any single performance are sold at market rates — and it must be said that the market is not, in fact, very reasonable — a quarter are given free to community groups through the Theater Development Fund and a quarter cost $35 if you can find them. Quibble with the model; pick at the play. But in imagining a way forward instead of whimpering in despair, Audible x Together is doing something akin to what Silverman does with 'Creditors.' You might say they both look for the value in the past but don't get stuck in it. They play it forward.
