Denmark - Culture - Theatre and Drama

Denmark
4. Culture
4.8 Theatre and Drama

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4.8.1 Scool Drama
4.8.2 Strolling Players
4.8.3 Theatre for Court and City
4.8.4 The Royal Theatre
4.8.5 Amateur Theatre
4.8.6 New Theatres
4.8.7 For and Against Naturalism
4.8.8 Absurdism and Social Realism
4.8.9 Radio and Television Theatre
4.8.10 The 1960s and 1970s
4.8.11 The 1980s and 1990s
4.8.12 Biographies

As in the surrounding countries, pre-Christian rituals in Denmark presumably contained elements of acting, but nothing is known with certainty. Nor are there any written sources for mediaeval liturgical drama in the church, although murals and extant props point to the existence of such drama. The most elaborate Scandinavian hagiographic miracle play, on the subject of "Saint Knud Lavard", (Ludus de Sancto Kanuto Duce), was probably performed in the market square in Ringsted. It is known in a version from about 1500, but may well be based on earlier models.

School Drama [top]

There was school drama even in late Catholic times, but it was the Protestant school drama that came to constitute a significant movement of cultural policy in the market towns. The kings, too, were happy to be entertained by school drama with its biblical, moralising and satirical subjects. The texts were often translated from Latin and German, but a native Danish drama established itself with the Viborg clergyman Hieronymus Justesen Ranch as its most original talent. His Karrig Nidding (Nithing the Niggard) from about 1600 is a proper character comedy with traces of old carnival farce. However, at the beginning of the 17th century the church's views on the theatre changed in the wake of the Lutheran orthodoxy that was now the order of the day. It was argued that the theatre led people into sin and vice.

Strolling Players [top]

In time, professional troupes of players, who travelled around in Europe in the second half of the 16th century, began to come to Denmark. Thus in 1586 Frederik II had an English troupe in his service, including the comic actor William Kempe, who later acted for Shakespeare. Later the groups of strolling players, who after c. 1600 were mainly German and Dutch speakers, travelled around in Denmark, performing among other things the extravagant so-called Haupt- und Staatsaktionen. The monarchy's wish to give dramatical expression to its own greatness, especially under Christian IV, took on ever more spectacular forms. The wedding of the heir to the throne in 1634 was a gigantic investment; The Grand Bedding of the Couple was a panoply of comedy, music, dance and fireworks lasting for over a fortnight. Here the court ballet was introduced, a kind of allegorical total theatre with the most distinguished members of the court themselves among the actors.

Theatre for Court and City [top]

The model for the absolute monarchy was naturally France. As Crown Prince, Christian V had visited Louis XIV and was inspired both to a grandiose cult of the monarch in opera ballets and to putting on French classical drama. Under Christian V and Frederik IV French court companies came and went, and they also gave public performances. René Magnon de Montaigu, who belonged to the Molière school, came to Denmark in 1686 and in 1700 became the leader of the royal company. From temporary stages in, among other places, Copenhagen Castle, the company moved in 1703 into the newly erected opera house in Bredgade in Copenhagen, which was intended for both the court and the city. Within a few years, however, the project proved not to be viable, and the building was put to other use; it is today the seat of the The High Court of Eastern Denmark (Østre Landsret). Inspired by, among other things, the Venetian opera stages, Frederik IV built a castle theatre which was inaugurated in 1712 and contained boxes and stage machinery, just as there had been in the Opera House. Montaigu here presented a repertoire of festive allegorical plays and French drama.

With the renewed demand for entertainment after the Great Northern War (1700-1721) there were performances in German which lavishly mixed drama, acrobatics, mechanics and tableaux. As a new theatre and centre for entertainment a theatre was opened in Copenhagen in 1722 in Lille Grønnegade, the present-day Ny Adelgade. Meanwhile, the king had dismissed his court players, and the thought now arose of opening a Danish-language theatre under the direction of Montaigu in the Lille Grønnegade theatre. Here, Ludvig Holberg created a satirical modern drama with a gallery of bourgeois characters, in harmony with the general endeavour of the time to raise people's cultural and moral levels and turn them into efficient members of society. The satire was also directed against what was said to be the old-fashioned Haupt- und Staatsaktionen, and thereby at the irrational theatricality of the Baroque. Several of the actors were students, which immediately caused conflict with the university: The old theological antipathy to the theatre re-emerged. In 1722 the theatre opened with Molière's L'Avare, and there was the first professional performance of an original Danish drama, Holberg's Den politiske kandestøber (The Political Tinker). The main inspiration was Molière, but Holberg also had a liking for the robust comedy of Italian commedia dell'arte. In the long run, the public deserted the theatre, and it had to close in 1727. The 1728 Fire of Copenhagen put a complete end to theatres: Frederik IV had religious scruples, and his pietist son, Christian VI introduced a de facto ban on the theatre, which was maintained until his death in 1746.

The Royal Theatre [top]

Theatrical life began to flourish again, and in 1748 Danish comedy could move into Eigtved's elegant theatre on Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen. Formally, it was the king who lent his name to the theatre, but in 1750 he passed it on to the city of Copenhagen - along with a sizeable debt. The idea of a theatre for court and city had now been realised, and it was from the start characterised by Holbergian dramatic techniques. In time, however, the emphasis shifted from ridiculing vice to glorifying virtue, which went hand in hand with a new moral sensibility such as is found in Charlotta Dorothea Biehl's comedies from the 1760s and 1770s.

In 1770 the theatre actually came under royal directorship as The Royal Danish Theatre, and from 1772 it was directly financed by the Privy Purse and formally subject to the Lord Chamberlain's Office. The theatre was given a prominent place in the incipient public debate. Although the elevated and musical genres were parodied in Johan Herman Wessel's Kærlighed uden strømper (Love Without Stockings) (1773), a growing interest in national and patriotic themes at the end of the 18th century resulted in a number of original Danish tragedies and music dramas with motifs taken from mythology, history and the life of the ordinary people.

National Romanticism on the German model reached the theatre at the beginning of the 19th century, not least in the work of Adam Oehlenschläger, who made his début as a dramatist with Hakon Jarl (Earl Hakon the Mighty) (1808).

This was an impassioned dramatic form, in contrast to the Holbergian sober-mindedness that had typified the national repertoire from the start. The way had been prepared for Shakespeare, and Hamlet had its Danish premiere in 1813. On the other side stood Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who as a critic in the 1820s made strict demands on form and inspired by Parisian theatre created the vaudeville - charming, satirical and musical portrayals of the little world of the bourgeoisie. The theatre was bathed in a radiance of its own at this time. To write for the stage was a matter of some prestige, and the Royal Theatre came to be seen as a leading cultural institution. There were several outstanding talents among those associated with it, and authors competed in writing for them, in particular for Johanne Luise Heiberg, the undisputed prima donna of Romanticism, whose range stretched from the romantic and erotic to the passionate and demonic, though always observing the boundaries of aesthetics and good taste. After the end of the absolute monarchy the Royal Theatre was in 1849 placed under State control and given a commoner as director - in the first instance Johan Ludvig Heiberg, whose aesthetical ideals soon came into conflict with the realism that was pushing itself forward in the middle of the century.

The present Royal Theatre was opened at the same time (1874) and in the same style as the Paris Opéra. It was well suited to opera and ballet, but scarcely the ideal setting for the sitting-room drama that reached new peaks with the premieres of Henrik Ibsen's dramas (such as Et dukkehjem, 1879, A Doll's House). This stage naturalism established a link with the controversial literary and political currents centred on the brothers Georg and Edvard Brandes. The demands for authenticity in setting and psychology were implemented from the 1880s by the director William Bloch. With this, the meticulous director had once and for all made his appearance as a key figure in theatrical performances. Naturalism was also the hallmark of the drama school established in 1886.

Amateur Theatre [top]

Since the latter half of the 18th century the middle classes had gone mad about the theatre - a theatre run by themselves on a non- professional basis. In the long run, the foundations were laid here for a healthy tradition of amateur drama, often related to the folk high school movement (and from 1948 organised under the aegis of the Danish Amateur Theatre Association). At the same time drama clubs were becoming important as a means of extending professional drama to the provinces, where from c. 1820 their stages were used by touring groups of actors. This also created the basis for permanent theatres in the major provincial cities.

New Theatres [top]

While the Royal Theatre was increasingly becoming the place for the educated, the broader public started going to the "secondary theatres", which were permitted with the introduction of democracy, the Casino from 1848 being the first of them. However, the Royal Theatre retained an absolute monopoly of the more serious repertoire until 1889. On the other hand, Holberg, Oehlenschläger, Heiberg, etc. could well be staged, often by itinerant groups, in the provinces. At the beginning of the 20th century the theatres in Århus and Odense had also established themselves with their own permanent companies performing a repertoire varying from plays reminiscent of the Royal Theatre to others of a lighter kind. Aalborg followed suit in 1937. After the First World War the Royal Theatre's monopoly was further undermined: the Dagmar Theatre and the Betty Nansen Theatre established themselves as artistic competitors to the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen.

For and Against Naturalism [top]

The pioneering formal experiments throughout Europe at the beginning of the century did not generally speaking have any repercussions in Denmark. Gordon Craig's non-naturalistic staging of Ibsen's Kongsemnerne (The Pretenders) in The Royal Theatre in 1926 was thus a resounding fiasco. Experiments were largely left to amateur or semi-professional experimental theatres, or to a daring small theatre such as Riddersalen, which in 1935 staged Kjeld Abell's satirical play Melodien der blev væk (The Melody That Got Lost), the greatest success of the inter-war years. The 1930s were characterised by important dramatists like Kaj Munk, Carl Erik Soya and Kjeld Abell, who were performed in both the private theatres and the Royal Theatre, where especially Abell helped breach the well-established naturalist tradition. During the German occupation (1940-1945), foreign impulses were naturally limited, and the theatres had to carry on under a state censorship no longer based on moral views, but with a direct political motivation.

Absurdism and Social Realism [top]

Very soon after the war ended, the modern international repertoire made its appearance, for instance French absurdism and English social realism in the 1950s. Absurdism was in particular promoted by the Student Theatre, which acted as an experimental stage for gifted young talents who later came to leave their mark on the professional theatre as directors, actors and playwrights. Radio and television theatre soon also opened up to this repertoire and these figures. The theatres then followed suit. Bertolt Brecht became firmly established in the theatre in the 1960s. And with this, a subject that was to dominate the next ten years had made its appearance: sociological and political (Brecht- inspired) drama as opposed to a more fantastic (Artaud-inspired) view of the theatre. In the small theatres that emerged in the 1960s, the first of which was Fiolteatret from 1962, absurdism was in the forefront.

Radio and Television Theatre [top]

Radio drama was originally seen as a means of enlightening the public and a vehicle for culture. From 1925 broadcasts were made of the Danish School Theatre's performances of classics, and within a few years the repertoire consisted of a mixture of adapted stage drama and original plays for radio. Major stage artists like Poul Reumert thus reached a broader public. From the 1950s radio theatre obtained the technical opportunity of going its own way. The 1960s saw the emergence of plays specifically for radio, and Danish authors could here experiment independently of the financial constraints by which the theatres were bound. From the 1950s television drama underwent a similar development, from being tied to the theatre and the idea of "the great classics" to independent artistic expressions. The creation of original Danish television drama was in particular a high priority 1970-19 85. It had a particularly powerful representative in Leif Panduro's bitter-sweet portrayal of the traumas behind a bourgeois facade.

The 1960s and 1970s [top]

The establishment of a Ministry for Cultural Affairs in 1961 brought an end to the situation in which the Royal Theatre belonged under the Ministry of Education and other theatres under the Ministry of Justice. The Theatre Act of 1963 determined among other things the framework for support for the provincial theatres in Århus, Aalborg and Odense, and through grants it gave the Theatre Council a significant influence on the areas of theatre life outside the fixed institutional framework. In general, the 1960s and 1970s were a time of important cultural initiatives pointing to democratisation and decentralisation both at a political level and among the many experimental or socially critical theatre groups addressing themselves to a different public from the established theatres, including the younger age groups. Children had so far mainly been provided for by the Danish School Theatre. When the School Theatre was disbanded in 1968, the way was clear for an array of itinerant theatre groups treating the problems of children and young people in their own language. In many respects, Denmark became a pioneer in drama for children and young people. Of great significance for experimental drama, also in an international perspective, was Eugenio Barba's Odin Theatre, established in Holstebro in 1966. In training, changes were also made in relation to the established institutions: The Royal Theatre Drama School was disbanded in 1968, and the National School of Dramatic Art opened, first with an eye to training actors, and then subsequently directors, set designers and technicians.

From 1971 cultural democracy also asserted itself in the form of a scheme run by the theatre-goers' organisation ARTE, making it possible to take out tickets for a number of performances at a reduced price. Legislation later applied the model to the whole country, the Act coming into force in 1975, with state and county support. This has without any doubt had a positive influence on the sale of tickets, but it has also been criticised, among other things for preventing flexibility in the planning of the theatres.

The 1980s and 1990s [top]

Provisions for regional theatres from 1979 brought some group theatres under the aegis of the county and local authorities, with the institutionalisation inevitably resulting from that. Social preoccupations were replaced in the 1980s and 1990s by the exploration of aesthetical and artistic effects. A generation of younger producers found more fragmented ways of expressing themselves. A very dynamic and direct tone, appealing particularly to a young audience, came into its own in 1992 when the Dr. Dante group took over the Aveny Theatre. Concurrently, a new generation of dramatists was emerging, often with a blend of ironic realism and linguistic exuberance bordering upon the absurd. Otherwise, as grants became more and more difficult to come by, the picture was one of a return to a repertoire more certain to appeal to a large audience. Placed outside the institutions, performance theatre was especially characteristic of the early 1990s, when Hotel Pro Forma in particular made an international reputation for itself. Performances derived from avant- garde art and happenings, breaking down the boundaries between the forms of expression and cultivating visual and sound effects. At the end of the 1990s the Royal Theatre was in an unsettled state. A debate flared up about the traditional housing of the different art forms (opera, ballet and drama) under one roof and the feeling that the architectural setting was outdated gave rise to discussion of the siting of a new playhouse, which may be built at Kvæsthusbroen by the Port of Copenhagen. A new opera house, designed by the architect Henning Larsen and donated by the AP Møller foundation, is planned to be built on Holmen in 2005/2006. From the 1997-1998 season the Royal Theatre began to focus on younger directors and designers, and thus on a younger audience.

Bent Holm

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