When We Dead Awaken
Director Stein Winge continues his collaboration with dramaturge Bibbi Moslet on radical, yet considered rewrites of Ibsen plays.
Directed by Stein Winge
An aging sculptor departs for a health spa with his young wife. The trip is a last-ditch attempt to save an ailing marriage, but also a pilgrimage to the place where he completed his life’s great work. And where he failed the great love of his life, the woman who was his model and muse. Many years later, they meet again.
This is the framework for Ibsen’s final play, When We Dead Awaken, and this is the framework for Winge’s production at this year’s Ibsen Festival. But this is where all similarities end. Dramaturge Bibbi Moslet has taken great liberties in her adaptation of Ibsen’s text, employing juxtapositions and radical cuts in the script: The Bear Hunter is gone, the characters’ names are gone, as are all references to time and place.
All the clearer to see the stories of jealousy and betrayal, liberation and reconciliation unfold as the three characters stumble around on a constantly collapsing surface, with the audience up close. Maybe too close, as it forces the characters to look closely at themselves, with disastrous consequences.