Oddbjørn Johannessen, "Jens Bjørneboe og norsk teater". Sørlandsk magasin 12 (1996):17-19. ©1996 by Oddbjørn Johannessen. Used by permission. English translation ©2000 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.
1995 is a Bjørneboe year. On October 9 he would have been 75, and the anniversary is being celebrated with seminars, book publications and exhibitions. The author, the visual artist and the human being are receiving attention and being debated in the columns. The dramatist Bjørneboe, however, seems to have been forgotten—at least by our institutional theaters. The only production of a Bjørneboe drama I have registered during the anniversary years is the Thesbiteatret's production of Amputation in Tønsberg in June. This has led me to make some reflections concerning Jens Bjørneboe and the Norwegian theater.
The antipathy toward Bjørneboe the dramatist on the part of the Norwegian theatrical establishment is not of recent date. When he was alive, most established institutions considered him a hair in the soup, and in theatrical circles the myth was created that he was difficult to work with. Of course he was! Most artists have problems with group dynamics. Yet matters were not so bad as to prevent him from making all the dramas he wrote into collaborative projects. He didn't let go of a single dramatic work before several professional theater folk had been involved in the artistic process and had been allowed a decisive influence on the result. In many ways one can say that few Norwegian dramatists have collaborated so intensely as Jens Bjørneboe. What is particularly striking is that most of his collaborative partners were foreigners. Generally these had in common an engagement in some form of experimental theater—at least measured against the traditions of the Norwegian theater establishment.
However, his first collaborator did belong to the tradition of Ibsen—Helge Krog. Krog understood the dramatic potential latent in the novel The Evil Shepherd, and he and Bjørneboe planned a naturalistic theater piece based on raw material from this novel. The collaboration ceased with Krog's death in 1962, but some of his suggestions were included in the final version. By the time Bjørneboe took the material up again, he had made contact with the Israeli director Izzy Abrahami, who stood in a wholly different theater tradition. In the printed program of the premiere at Oslo Nye Teater in 1965, Bjørneboe gives Abrahami this mention: "It was Izzy Abrahami who gave me the impetus to rewrite the play in a form which accorded with my own true view of the theater. Sometimes one needs a kick in the rear to actually venture into the water. It was Abrahami who kicked me off the springboard, and I am very grateful to him for that. A couple of the scenes he himself directly suggested to me."
Several meetings with Bertold Brecht's Berliner Ensemble (the first in the spring of 1959) likewise had a decisive significance both for Bjørneboe's vision of the theater and for his network of professional theater contacts. It caused him, among other things, to insert songs of comment and contrast into both Many Happy Returns and his next play, The Bird Lovers (1966). The composer for the first play was Finn Ludt, while one of the Berliner Ensemble's "House composers"—Hans Dieter Hosalla—was responsible for the musical side of the original production of The Bird Lovers at the National Theater. Hosalla had, among other things, also written music for Brecht's Arthuro Ui. Another "Berliner," Carl Maria (Charly) Weber, had responsibility for the direction.
Meanwhile yet another foreigner had taken an interest in The Bird Lovers, in fact while the piece was still in a outline stage. The Italian-born Eugenio Barba had studied with the Pole Jerzy Grotowski, whose avant-garde theater was located in a town near of Auschwitz. Barba started the Odin Theater in Oslo in 1962, but by 1966 the project was so poorly circumstanced that the operation was moved to Holstebro in Denmark. Barba and the Odin Theater succeeded in putting on their version of The Bird Lovers in Oslo—an "adaptation" based on a working draft of the text under the title The Ornithophiles. Bjørneboe was both surprised and pleased: "I have worked with directors from Sweden and Israel, and I have always learned something, because the collaboration took place with trust and seriousness. But I have hardly ever gained such a shockingly intense new insight at a performance as at the Odin Theater's version of The Bird Lovers. One might almost say a new, physical insight." (Quoted from "On the Odin Theater's adaptation of The Bird Lovers," On Theater, Pax 1978. The Swede he refers to here is probably Kåre Santesson, who staged Many Happy Returns at the Göteborg Stadsteater in 1966.)
Bjørneboe kept in touch with Barba after the latter had moved to Denmark, and he was an important conversation partner while Bjørneboe was working on Semmelweis. It was Barba who suggested framing this play a prologue and an epilogue set in the present. Another important conversation partner here was the Swedish actor—at that time head of the Scala Theater in Stockholm—Allan Edwall. However, the work on Semmelweis shows that Bjørneboe could also collaborate with leading Norwegian theater folk. When the play was produced at the National Theater in 1968, it was Magne Bleness who directed. Otherwise Bjørneboe had scant faith in the Norwegian theater expertise of the time: "Most of the directors I've met know as much about literary dramaturgy as an oyster knows about skiing." ( "On the Odin Theater's adaptation of The Bird Lovers") But on principle he was for collaboration: "All artists need help from outside." His trust in the Norwegian theater establishment was of course not enhanced when the chief of the National Theater, Erik Kristen-Johanssen, declined an invitation from the biennial International Theater Festival in Venice to participate with The Bird Lovers in the fall of 1967.
A sketch of Amputation (1970) had been published in the magazine Ordet in 1964, but was turned into a stage piece only when the leader of the Friteatren in Sweden, Martha Vestin, approached him in 1969 to ask if he had anything she could use. And when the play was ready to be performed, it was as a result of teamwork. Teamwork was also the modus operandi in 1973 when Helge Reistad and the ensemble of Scene 7 staged The Torgersen Case, based on the documents from the trial of Frederik Fasting Torgersen, the most talked-about criminal case of the day. Scene 7 was also the arena for the last play Jens Bjørneboe managed to finish, Blue Jeans: a collage about big business and the life of a marketer (1976).
This quick survey of some of the dramatist Bjørneboe's most important working partners should show that he did not regard his own texts as final. He permitted others to "tinker" with them, provided they were masters of their profession. Several statements indicate that he considered most Norwegian directors either too hung up on tradition or too market-oriented. However, he was reacting not only on his own account. He was concerned about the conditions being offered to young dramatists. The institutional theater's main stages were closed to experiments. In an interview in Fædrelandsvennen (May 10, 1969) he expresses himself in strong and unequivocal language about Norwegian theater politics: "I am concerned about the tendency for the small stages to become 'cabaretized,' while the main stages are 'musicalized'. Unfortunately things seem to be developing in that direction. The theaters do their duty by the young and by national drama by letting them into the cheap small stages in the amphitheater. That way one gets what one wants: text-writers who can put together sketches, little songs, while the public sits gratefully in a little flock and is content with what it gets.... That is deadly dangerous. The writer is never put to the test. "
And so what happens on the main stages?
Oh, you know "the imported, ready-made theater successes, traded through agents and chosen according to how long they have run in New York, London or Moscow."
There is nobody who gambles on new, Norwegian drama. That is too risky. The market rules. That is Bjørneboe's summing-up, and he sees only one way out of dead water: "With all respect for the small stages and experimental theaters, I feel convinced that we cannot have any national drama unless a place is made for it on the main stages. We must do that—that is what those stages are for!"
Since 1969 Bjørneboe himself has been largely relegated to little theaters, insofar as he has been played at all. And it is the amateur theaters which have found him interesting (with the exception of Norwegian Broadcasting's radio and television theater). It is a paradox that the Norwegian dramatist who more than anyone else in the postwar period has written dramas which have aroused interest abroad, who wrote excitingly and insightfully about theater theory, and who was unusually well oriented about what was happening in the international theater world, has become such a stepchild here at home.
Of course it may be objected—and rightly—that his plays are not flawless, but his material affords great possibilities for directors and actors (cf. his own statement on several occasions: "My plays are scores for performance.").
Besides, every institutional theater with respect for itself and its own role surely has a cultural duty which transcends the given theater chief's personal taste and opinion.
Nor would it surprise me if the dramatist Bjørneboe could become a box-office success (and here I speak as a philologist, to twist Piccolino's well-known words in The Bird-Lovers a bit). It appears that he still has the ability to engage young people. In high school and college, for example, he is one of the most popular subjects for term papers in literature.
Regardless, any problems of working with him have long since become passé. The man Jens Bjørneboe has now been dead and buried for twenty years. The excuses become poorer and poorer.