The last few years in Norwegian theater life have been marked by the theater chiefs' willingness to occupy themselves with Norwegian drama. The Oslo chiefs, at least, have adopted an attitude toward new Norwegian plays which is to the highest degree deserving of respect. We haven't had to wait long for the results of this new interest: from the hands of younger Norwegian writers there have been coming thick and fast a series of new plays — or stage texts — which at least show that we stand fully on a level with our Scandinavian brother countries. The old myth among theater folk (who according to their own expression really "know theater") that "Norwegian writers cannot write for the stage; they only preach" is after a couple of seasons effectively laid to rest.

To be sure, the changed situation has affected a number of more or less professional theater critics as a personal and bloody humiliation. But that plays little role.

The only thing which is of significance is that the line at the Oslo theaters in this respect will be continued for several years forward.

What has happened so far can without exception be hailed with joy. And what follows in this article refers in no way to Norwegian theater in particular, but to tendencies which are in evidence everywhere these days — and which I believe constitute a threat to the vital nerve of the whole: to the drama in its essence, to the drama as literature.

While the novel as a literary genre is too young to have been able to acquire any satisfactory and useable theory, or "poetics" — but has merely called forth theoretical confusion — the drama, with its two-thousand-year evolution, stands in a different situation: in the course of these two millennia the drama has truly acquired a poetics — and, mind you, a poetics which is built on empirical observation, on concrete experience, and not on speculation. This theory has in turn been subjected to the sharpest and most skeptical criticism, and what actually survives today as tenable poetics for the drama is no more than a small handful of unbreakable laws. They are few, but they are valid! It is not least the last decades which, by their criticism of inherited dogmas, have freed poetics from superfluous and untrue "laws" and helped to make the necessities which really count far more visible than they were. It turns out that if the few true dramatic laws are really complied with, it is astonishing what is playable on the stage.

And it is here that our new confusion begins.

By musicalizing or cabaretizing material which is in itself undramatic— that is, by adding a little music here, a little colored light there, a song where the logical dramatic transition fails, by overwhelming a text with costumes, choreography, dance numbers, as a last resort with pure revue acts and stale jokes — one can manage to entertain an amusement-hungry public with practically anything. Here a destructive element enters from the big, technical modern theater's enormous mechanical apparatus, an apparatus which because of its appalling cost already appears to be tempting the directors beyond their means: it must be used, both because it is so expensive that it is a shame to let it lie there dong nothing, and because it is a tempting toy.

An effect which is far more dreadful in the long run, of course, lies in the fact that the investments in the foofaraw must necessarily turn a profit, and by upping costs of the theater business unto insanity they force the theater to commercialize both repertoire and effects.

In other words, we are right in the middle of what in the old days was called "trappings theater" — plush and mauve silk. Those were not nice words, and they weren't meant to be nice either. And at the same time our whole cultural and artistic milieu is today so thoroughly commercialized that nobody finds anything wrong with the fact that every means is permitted so long as it brings money into the till.

The modern operetta- or musical-theater is by no means a truly modern theater; on the contrary, it is an enormous regression to the trappings theater of the last century — with the sole difference that the ticket-buying social classes no longer admire the costume fashions of Vienna and Paris, their ideals have followed the migration of the big money from Europe to New York. Another development is that today's children of affluence don't have to tax their brains with the effort to learn French; they can get along with the far simpler American lingo.

One positive trait of trappings theater has always been that it entails a high degree of purely theatrical perfectionism. But that advantage is canceled out by the entertainment industry's eradication of all thought content, the stupefying effect of text and music, the idiocy of the advertising, the banality of the PR campaigns for the stars — in short, by making the whole theater undertaking a caricature of itself, a mere performing monkey for the public who can afford to pay.

This operetta and trappings theater, which meets with such boundless joy and good will among both the critics and the press in general — and which in its shamelessness even takes advantage of the public funds which are of course meant for support of the serious theater — this musical theater has yet another secret. To understand it, one must for a moment zero in on the critics' outbursts of joy every time they are permitted to see productions which don't give them anything unpleasant to think about, which above all are not "political." One ought not to plague people in season and out with politics. But does anyone really believe that these theater carnivals are unpolitical?

If people like the problemlessness in farces, trappings plays, musicals, etc. etc. so boundlessly much, it is not because they are apolitical, but because they — not only in what little content they may have, but through their whole existence, through the orgies of money which are necessary to stage them, in short: through their very being — in reality are politically strongly conservative: they are, like our domestic center Høvikodden, one huge reactionary tribute to the power of money, a single obscene exposure of the fact that here art is property, bought and paid for — it's at heart a shameless affront to all serious cultural life in its confession of power.

Eerily enough, the same thing applies in Eastern Europe.

There too one can see trappings theater of the same world class as in the USA. Just as perfect in its trappings, technique and cult of the stars — with precisely the same stage effects, and above all with the same budget. Whether the budget is in dollars or in rubles, and whether the spectacle is called "The Collective Farmers' Dance around the Tractor" or "The Producers' Dance around the Golden Calf" really makes no difference. The spirit is the same: a tribute to the power which makes it possible to create such an expensive theater.

That this deafening racket "draws a public" is really no excuse whatsoever. On the contrary, it means a belittling of the theater as a whole; it means a massive contempt both for theater and public. An ordinary musical director can no more use the "public" as an excuse than a poet can justify writing treacly verse on the pretext of pleasing readers.

Characteristic, too, is the division of labor which lies behind a musical production: one group to draft the plot, one group to write dialogue, one group to write the uninspired texts for the "songs". But above all: One group to steal themes and ideas from those who were potent enough to think up such things themselves — from Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw and poor old Isherwood, all of whom must be "reworked" to be sufficiently castrated to please a solvent public. Animals have their own organization: "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." Writers do not.

The legalized, shameless mass theft which goes on, and which is today is downright trendy, characteristically enough wins full acceptance within a society which — in everything but art — regards the right of property as its only true religion. When the writer is well and truly dead, and an adequate length of time has elapsed, world art in its entirety belongs exclusively to the speculators, subsidized by the state which is also a speculator. The power and the money always lie in the same place

The castrati from the trappings and show business are taking an ever greater degree of stolen goods from the great, unpleasant, noncastrated writers or composers: they rewrite them down to their own level, and if that isn't enough, they steal their lives as well. Both the US and the motherland Norway are now having the pleasure of meeting the singing Edvard Grieg. I can really understand why people are letting down their pants.

Why we have had to wait so long for a musicalization of our two great anarchists Strindberg and Ibsen is not easy to grasp. But there are great possibilities in letting Strindberg sing the main soprano role in Miss Julie or the baritone in To Damascus. Also in having Ibsen sing the tenor in Brand (of course he could sing!).

There is an old but extremely modern definition of the word "theater": "A plank, two people and a passion."

And a painting is a canvas with color on it. The original manuscript of Romeo and Juliet didn't cost four kroner in paper and ink. The rest one cannot make with the aid of money, sound systems or spotlights. In former times it was known as Spirit.

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This page added July 2001