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Ingmar Bergman Directs ‘Long Day's Journey into Night’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Egil Törnqvist
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Abstract

In connection with the Eugene O'Neill centenary in 1988 Ingmar Bergman directed Long Day's Journey into Night at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, where this play (like A Touch of the Poet and Hughie), also had its world premiere. While the director of the 1956 production, Bengt Ekerot, settled for a realistic approach. Bergman's pruned version, widely acclaimed both inside and outside Sweden, is existentially stylized. Here Egil Türnqvist discusses especially the visual aspects of the production, partly on the basis of information from the scenographer, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss. Egil Törnqvist received his doctorate from Uppsala University in 1969, and since then has been Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include A Drama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill's Super-Naturalistic Technique (1968). Strindberg och Bergman: Spöksonaten – drama och iscensättning (1973), Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure (1982), and (with Barry Jacobs) Strindberg's Miss Julie: a Play and Its Transpositions (1988). He contributed a production study of Bergman's production of Strindberg's Ghost Sonata to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, No. 11 (1973).

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 5 , Issue 20 , November 1989 , pp. 374 - 383
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

Notes and References

1. Quoted from Krutch's, Joseph Wood ‘Introduction’ to Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill (New York, 1932), p. xviiGoogle Scholar.

2. Olsson, Tom J. A., O'Neill och Dramaten (Stockholm, 1977), p. 103Google Scholar.

3. Gierow, Karl Ragnar, ‘Lång dags färd till London’, Svenska Dagbladet, 16 02 1972Google Scholar.

4. Eldridge, Florence, ‘Reflections on Long Day's Journey into Night: First Curtain Call for Mary Tyrone’, in Floyd, Virginia, ed., Eugene O'Neill: a World View (New York, 1979), p. 287Google Scholar.

5. A photograph of the veranda with the young Eugene, his brother Jamie, and his father James was reproduced in the theatre programme.

6. Bergman here seems to expect that the spectator should recognize the projected house as being that of the Monte Cristo cottage, although there is no photograph of the O'Neill summer house in the programme to help identify the projection.

7. Cf. the neoclassical New England columns prescribed by O'Neill for the mansion in Mourning Becomes Electra.

8. For a discussion of , Bergman's production of this play, see my article ‘Ingmar Bergman Directs Strindberg's Ghost Sonata’, Theatre Quarterly, 07–09 1973, p. 3–14Google Scholar.

9. Törnqvist, Egil, A Drama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill's Super-Naturalistic Technique (Uppsala, 1968), p. 101Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., p. 239 f.

11. Quoted from Frenz, Horst, ed., American Playwrights on Drama (New York, 1965), p. 3Google Scholar.