Photo: Karin Trine Pedersen
Photo: Karin Trine Pedersen
Photo: Karin Trine Pedersen
Photo: Karin Trine Pedersen
Photo: Karin Trine Pedersen
Photo: Karin Trine Pedersen
THEATER
Ingmar Bergman: The Autumn Sonata
Aalborg Theatre
It’s complicated – the relationship between mothers and daughters. We know that it can go completely wrong and that it can tear families apart.
It can be difficult to pinpoint the core of the problem, because childhood traumas are often unresolved in an ocean of silence. What we don’t talk about.
This is not the case in Ingmar Bergman’s film Høstsonaten from 1978. Here it is quite clear that postponement of needs, paragraph 1 of the parenting code, has not been used and nor can it be, here on the fall rope, where life’s harvest sonata unfolds between the world-famous concert pianist Charlotte and her two well-grown daughters.
Who have not seen their mother for seven years.
And it’s not a happy reunion. The mother is only concerned with the music, the art with K, and with her own recent loss of the latest husband. The daughter Eva, who is herself a pianist for a household need who does not invoke any kind of recognition from the mother, takes the opportunity to invite her to visit.
Of course in an attempt to provide the care that she herself has never received, and which is not now part of the mother’s plans either. There is no emotional exchange in sight, and it also ends in ragnarok and drama, before the mother again flies out into the world to fulfill her own mission and her own needs.
It is a grim story that follows Bergman’s 45-year-old screenplay quite closely in the theatre.
Aalborg Theater has brought popular Kirsten Olesen to North Jutland for the role of Charlotte, while the theatre’s own star, Marie Knudsen Fogh, plays Eva. The two are in every way as different as night and day in playing style and physique, a fact that they both play on in their respective roles.
Kirsten Olesen is the cool woman of the world who only feels something through music, and only on a theoretical level understands concepts like love and empathy – and who to that extent rejects that love conquers everything. It doesn’t. Art conquers all.
And Olesen is of course extremely professional and accurate in his characterization of the emotionally gifted Charlotte
Marie Knudsen Fogh, on the other hand, is full of emotions, most suppressed by an existential and all-consuming anger that has smouldered like a volcano all her life. Now she is ready to erupt, and it is not going quietly. As always, she manages to put herself into play with full force.
She is impressively dedicated on stage every time.
The lava of anger flows out and destroys any rather pitiful hope of reconciliation, understanding, love, empathy or just acceptance, and in the reality of the theater the sound level is turned up well in the final phase, so that we get a shock ride after an otherwise generally silent and clinical – also scenographic – performance.
Alongside the two main roles, Kathrine Høj Andersen and Patrick A. Hansen calmly and confidently play the disabled sister Helena and Eva’s husband, the priest Victor, who is the quiet, yet constant backup in Eva’s and Helena’s lives, who despite his and Eva’s own sorrows can bear to accept Charlotte, even though he has not been asked.
Theater
- Ingmar Bergman: The Autumn Sonata
- Staging: Camille Sieling Langdal
- Scenography: Peter Schulz
- Cast: Kirstrn Olesen, Marir Knudsrn Fogh, Kathrine Høj Andersen, Patrick A, Hansen
- Aalborg Theater until 25 May
It’s actually quite big and loving of him. After all, he is also only a peripheral supporting character in Charlotte’s egocentric universe. Not one to count on, and as such out of the danger zone.
The attempt at reconciliation and a door ajar for the love between mother and daughters was probably the last, doomed chance for some kind of normality. And it’s probably best to leave it at that.
Eva has released her anger, and perhaps that in itself can bring some kind of calm to her life in the rectory, and an opportunity to live with her traumas.
2024-04-27 18:35:30
#mom #emotionally #stunted #life #difficult