Dag Solstad - Novel 11, Book 18

The theatre director hailed from the capital; it was common practice to hire directors from outside, so there were plenty of them roaming all around the country, staging operettas and farces for local amateur theatres. But tracking down an itinerant Ibsen director was not easy. Finally they found an unemployed director in Oslo. He came up, attended the rehearsals, drank steadily, and can scarcely have remembered anything of it all. On the other hand, Hjalmar Ekdal (aka Bjørn Hansen) did.

To make a long story very short: it turned out to be a total flop. It was an extremely poor performance, and the scheduled six showings were reduced to four, the fourth and last of which had eighteen paying spectators in the auditorium. True, the director was a has-been, and drunk to boot, but Bjørn Hansen knew that they could not put the blame on him; he was simply an illustration of how things were, and how they had been all along. They just couldn’t pull it off. Bjørn Hansen had carefully studied Ibsen’s play, with underlinings, and thought he had understood it so thoroughly that he felt Hjalmar Ekdal’s Weltschmerz in himself. But to no avail. He knew how it should be done, of course, but in practice it became something quite different from what he had imagined. It became clunky. Oh, this naivety of Hjalmar Ekdal, which Bjørn Hansen knew and thought he had made his own — he would defend it and act it out as it had never been acted out before, because it arose from such a deep pain that he could not bear looking truth in the face, his smallness being based on the fact that he found himself in a great tragedy, which had befallen him through no fault of his own. But none of this emerged from Bjørn Hansen. None of this was part of his physical presence on the stage. It did not work. It turned into mere talk. He was nothing but a glum and tedious body on a stage. He made his gestures to no avail. Like the others. Like Gregers Werle, like Old Ekdal, like Hedvig, little Hedvig, whom Hjalmar Ekdal loved so deeply that he could not bear seeing her any more. Bjørn Hansen stood on stage acting a part, rather stupidly, as even he himself thought. The public did not laugh him to scorn, oh no, they tried to encourage him by showing their interest, by not yawning — well, even with tepid applause. But it was not up to scratch.

They couldn’t do it. It was all too clear that this was something for which they lacked every qualification. Bjørn Hansen had insufficient radiance to enable him to make Hjalmar Ekdal’s painful gestures. That was the bitter truth. He had not enough acting technique, and hence no radiance. It is not enough to feel, inwardly. That was demonstrated at the Kongsberg Cinema four times in the late autumn of 1983 (wasn’t it?).

And he had known it all along. He had known it was impossible, nobody can say otherwise. He knew that much about acting, about its being a profession, about art being involved, etc., that he realised he couldn’t possibly create the illusion of being Hjalmar Ekdal. But his desire to do so had been so damn strong that he had been unable to even consider this obvious fact.

This also applied to the others. Neither individually nor as an acting ensemble did they have what it took to perform this world-class play. If Hjalmar Ekdal was tedious on stage, the English engineer Brian Smith was no better as Gregers Werle, and his broken Norwegian by no means elevated his exchanges with Hjalmar Ekdal, in fact quite the contrary, and little Hedvig, who may have been sweet, was unfortunately unable to breathe life into the fragile figure who entered the attic and was so theatrical that Hjalmar Ekdal went rigid with terror during those sensitive moments when they had the large, empty stage entirely to themselves.

Afterwards they were both equally unhappy. The other actors took their defeat with composure, Bjørn Hansen and little Hedvig being the only ones who mourned — Bjørn Hansen in spite of knowing that the big effort he had spoken so fervently of for two years had been impossible for obvious reasons. It had been different with little Hedvig, who had thought it was possible. She was twenty-one, in her second year at the Drammen Nursing School; she had taken the train to Kongsberg for the rehearsals every afternoon, and had then waited at the station to take the last train back to her rented room in Drammen afterwards. What they did not know until later, when it came to light, was that she had taken six months’ leave from the Nursing School and used her student loan of 15,000 kroner to get to know Hedvig’s soul. With disastrous results. Although she had been fascinated by this invented fourteen-year-old girl’s mind — probably because it revealed to her a number of deep things about herself, which she had not been able to convey to anyone, not even her best friend, being so far removed from everyday speech as it was, but which she now discovered touched her in a fundamental way, and had a bearing on her quite frictionless relationship to her own parents — she managed nonetheless to destroy everything by acting in an appallingly stagey manner, and she did not even understand what was wrong, only that it was, and she wept on Hjalmar Ekdal’s grief-stricken shoulders after every one of those four performances. She had continued to live in a furnished room in Drammen, both during the rehearsals and the performances, because she had not dared admit to her parents, who lived in Kongsberg, in a house where her own room was always ready, how much she had really staked on becoming nothing less than inspired by appearing as Hedvig in The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen. And therefore she had dutifully gone back to Drammen and her alleged nurse’s training after each performance, also after the first night and before the first-night party.

While little Hedvig wept on Bjørn Hansen’s shoulder in the dressing room after the curtain came down the first night, Gina Ekdal came in, radiant. Gina Ekdal (aka Turid Lammers) had reasons to be radiant, because she was the only one who had salvaged something out of the wreck of this performance, one might say. Seeing the grief-stricken Bjørn Hansen and the weeping Hedvig, she said, ‘But it went all right, after all, with curtain calls and everything,’ without her forced encouragement helping at all. But for her the performance had been a success; she had taken the public by storm. It made her elated, and she barely noticed that a twenty-one-year-old sweet young woman was resting her head on her partner’s shoulder, for the other actors and the stage crew flocked round her, complimenting her on her acting, which had saved the whole evening, without at all considering that what had saved the evening and made her a success was that she had quite simply betrayed the entire performance by doing her act at cross-purposes to the ensemble. Turid Lammers had been fully aware that she was to represent a female character in an Ibsen play who possibly harboured a sombre secret that caused everything to fall apart, for others. She had loyally tried to bring out the serious nature of Gina Ekdal’s life and secret, without achieving anything but superficiality, and in this perspective she was no better or worse than the rest of the ensemble. But after noticing the lack of response from the audience, she broke away, conferring upon her character a charm that made the public wake up and chuckle with satisfaction. Turid played Gina Ekdal with overdone gestures, with cheap tricks, oh, she wagged her tail and charmed the local audience, which willingly succumbed to her for a fleeting moment.

Bjørn Hansen stood there with his tedious Hjalmar Ekdal witnessing all this. Onstage. With Gina Ekdal. The two of them were the only ones there. In the next-to-last scene. Now, too, when the fiasco was obvious, he yearned to portray this ridiculous figure, Hjalmar Ekdal, for he knew that this character was profoundly tragic, and this had to be made clear. Hjalmar Ekdal was a key that opened the door to some really dizzying questions; his fate had to be enacted in such a way that he could really hold his own against Gregers Werle’s last words to the effect that, if he now, after Hedvig’s death in the final scene, was capable of producing nothing but empty rhetoric, then life was simply not worth living — something that now, when Bjørn Hansen tried to bring out their meaning, fell flat. And there, beside him, was Gina Ekdal in the figure of Turid Lammers, radiant. He went down, but she refused to go down with him. Instead she wagged her tail and for a fleeting moment the audience forgot about this untalented production and allowed itself to be seduced by Turid Lammers. She stole the scene. Bjørn Hansen bravely played on as he approached the end of his project, while Turid displayed all of her charms. She stood there, in the merciful spotlight, a thick layer of make-up on her face, elated at having taken the public by storm, trembling all over, in fact, as Bjørn Hansen, who stood very close, could clearly see. Turid betrayed everything. The whole idea behind the performance, and behind him, in order to save what could be saved. Turid Lammers’s charm was to overpower Bjørn Hansen’s unsuccessful seriousness. It was a violation of everything they had agreed on in advance, and Bjørn Hansen ought to have felt a pinch of surprise at being stabbed in the back in this way. He should have accused her, asking with a deep groan as this was going on: ‘Why, why are you doing this to me?’ But he did not. He did not ask himself why she acted as she did. He only felt relief. Not because she was trying to salvage something from the wreckage, but because she refused to go down with him.