CUADERNOS DE CONTABILIDAD – 01231472

Bergman saw either of Sjöberg’s productions, he was undoubtedly aware of all this activity during the 1945-46 theatrical season.

It is a matter of record that Bergman was familiar with a 1946 production of Sartre’s The Unburied Dead, directed by Torsten Hammarén, during his first season at Göteborg Municipal Theatre. In an interview from 1979/80, Bergman references this production in connection with the topic of unseen or offstage/offscreen violence. He acknowledges using this method in The Seventh Seal [Det sjunde inseglet] (1957) for the death of a plague-ridden antagonist, calling it one of “a few small tricks” in common between his theatre and film work.²⁵¹ The reference is almost a passing one, and this interview omits considering the possible thematic connections, as well as choices in staging, between Bergman’s later film and Sartre’s play via the work of another director.

In the absence of any direct work on Sartre in production, one has to allow that it was this “theatre,”

namely the work of directors Sjöberg and Hammarén, through which Bergman first began to develop his understanding of Sartre and existential drama.²⁵² It is also worth noting that Hammarén’s

production of The Unburied Dead opened on 26 October 1946 and that Bergman’s production of Caligula followed on 29 November 1946. This was a significant concentration of existential drama at a single theatre. And it was at Göteborg that Bergman directed Magic, the original model for The Face.

IV. A double premiere at Göteborg: the performance source of The Face

251 Marker and Marker, A Life in the Theatre 23-24.

252 Reviews were available in the major papers, and the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s program for The Flies contains a lengthy author's note by Sartre, “A Defense for a Responsibly Aware Literature” [“Forvarstal för en ansvarskännande litteratur”].

Reviews, photographs, program notes, even the illustration of the Parisian scene at the Café de Flore can be considered potential sources of influence, along with Sjöberg's staging and correspondence. These may seem superficial compared with reading Being and Nothingness, but such influences are far from irrelevant. Bergman's tendencies seem always to have been toward practice and self-reflexivity, not academic.

99 A. Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s Magic (1913)

Chesterton’s play is readily dismissed by nearly every critic who has written about The Face. There are a number of reasons why this is a mistake. First of all, most critics who have actually read the play (and few have) note the similarities in setting between it and Bergman's film, namely an aristocratic home. They also note that the character of the magician in the play, variously called The Stranger and The Conjurer, demonstrates his routine to a skeptical audience, consisting of a doctor, a clergyman, and a young Americanized business entrepreneur (Morris). The story is inaugurated by an argument that opposes science to religion. Their host, the Duke, is largely absent from the “serious”

proceedings, and is instead relegated to popping in and out for the purposes of comic relief. There is also a young lady of the house (Patricia) who believes in the powers of magic. The magician is typically described as having lost faith in his ability to perform magic (Young and Cowie). Frank Gado has given the play more attention than most. The general consensus is that Chesterton's original was a slight affair and that Bergman invested his re-working with considerably more intellectual heft.

In fact, Chesterton labeled his anomalous script a “comedy,” as did Bergman.

But the play merely begins as a comedy and rather quickly devolves into an eccentrically-contrived metaphysical drama. The Duke has a niece and nephew, both of whom were born and raised in Ireland and, therefore, apparently nationally- and genetically-inclined toward perceiving fairies, “mental trouble,” and “family madness.”²⁵³ The young woman has met the magician on the grounds of the estate (their first encounter is presented as something of a prologue to the play proper) and, apparently, has accepted that he is a supernatural being. Therefore, when the magician appears in-of-doors and

253 Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Magic: A Fantastic Comedy (New York and London: The Knickerbocker Press, G. P.

Putnam’s Sons, 1914) 60; 64.

100 removes his cloak and hood (which, it is explained, provided an inadvertent disguise), the niece feels that she has been duped. Her brother, however, who has been living and working in the United States, is presented as the mentally unstable one. He has a mania for rational explanations, and when the magician begins to incite phenomena that are inexplicable, the young man lapses into a feverish

dementia that renders him invalid. In fact, following the magician’s “show,” this character becomes an off-stage presence, even though the remainder of the play is ostensibly concerned with restoring to him his health and senses. What is disclosed as the magician’s crisis is his mistrust of the supernatural forces that he, we are told, truly has access to. These forces are made palpable to the other characters, including the man of science and the man of religion, and Chesterton actually stages a kind of

exorcism rather than a comedy.

Class issues in the play, as in Bergman’s film, are also an issue, formulaically contrived in the romance between the niece and the magician. The niece is willing to enter into marriage with The Stranger, who abjures on the basis of his own parent’s mismatched relationship. But, at the play's end, and with the same succinct and arbitrary flavor that ends The Face, the niece announces, through a discourse on the nature of fairy tales, that she and the magician will enjoy a happy ending together. If there is comedy in the play, it is that each ideological position is ultimately demonstrated as untenable;

yet there is, apparently, such a thing as supernatural evil.

No critic seems to have previously stressed this point, but both pieces rely on terror to convince their characters and audiences of a certain seriousness of purpose. Chesterton relies on actors to convey a sense of supernatural presence, accompanied by stage effects that (as the earlier magic show has demonstrated) we know to be contrived and belonging to the apparatus of theatre. Similarly, Bergman's post-autopsy “horror” sequence is dependent on the creation of supernatural effects that transcend the illusionism demonstrated by Vogler in his earlier demonstration. Both pieces seek to

101 ground their own illusion-making in plausible cause-and-effect, however. Chesterton’s magician informs the mentally-afflicted nephew of a ‘natural” explanation for the phenomenon that has induced the young man’s crisis; however, neither the audience nor any onstage character is informed of this secret: our knowledge is that this effect was in fact the result of supernatural intervention. In

Bergman’s film, Vergérus offers his own explanation for his terror; rather than instilling a belief in the supernatural, all that Vogler has accomplished has been a “fear of death, nothing more”; this admission is followed by a brief pause however, as the enormity of the confession suddenly registers with both men. The key distinction, therefore, is the recognition of individual mortality (as in Heidegger) as opposed to finding a “rational” explanation for the presence of the supernatural.

But there is also a dramaturgical irreverence on the authors’ parts with respect to this seriousness, particularly toward their protagonists after they have been de-masked. Bergman has Vogler begging from both Mrs. Egerman and Vergérus, an arbitrary shift in demeanor that seems more conceptual and demonstrative on Bergman’s part, rather than motivated by Vogler’s personality or circumstances.

Similarly, when seeking an emotional demonstration from a hitherto restrained protagonist, Chesterton seems to ironically abdicate any authorial responsibilities with a stage direction to the actor playing The Conjurer: “Doing whatever passionate things people do on the stage.”²⁵⁴

While this stage direction describes a comically written perepeteia in which two overwrought examples of late Romanticism discover their mutual attraction, this recognition is accomplished through a de-masking that places both characters in a new relation not only to one another, but also to themselves. The mask that the subject assumed the Other had accepted is proven ineffective. This de-masking that proposes a new existential situation for the subject is a staple of Bergman’s dramaturgy

254 Ibid 77.

102 and philosophy. In Chesterton’s play, this de-masking creates a new social potential, one that is

affirmed by the end of the play and that also corresponds with The Face. The Conjurer, while “doing whatever passionate things people do on the stage,” declares that, “I am a man. And you are a woman.

And all the elves have gone to elfland, and all the devils to hell. And you and I will walk out of this great vulgar house and be married.”²⁵⁵ The promise of a new marriage, or a re-marriage, is literally enacted in the film: Vogler and Manda, and the coachman Simson and the maid Sarah, depart as new couples, freed from their status as social inferiors within the “great, vulgar house” of the councilman and his fellows, the doctor and the constable.

While it is certainly legitimate to consider The Face in relation to Bergman’s production of The Misanthrope, this also favors the critical inclination to affirm comparisons between Bergman and a major playwright, a bias maintained at the expense of dismissing an aesthetically inferior playwright who may have been just as influential. Why should Magic have persisted in Bergman’s memory and serve as the primary source for a later creative project?²⁵⁶ The answer is not only in Bergman’s work at Malmö during this time, but also in the collaborative relationships that gave shape to the Göteborg production in 1947, and the re-surfacing of this project and relationships in The Face in 1958. The fact that Gertrud Fridh plays an analogous role in both the play and the film has to be considered as a source of influence; Fridh was a direct, physical, and agentic link between the two productions. There is also the re-casting (or correction) of Max von Sydow in Anders Ek’s role as the magician; and there

255 Ibid.

256 Cf. Gado 230. Gado thinks the reason for the appeal of the play for Bergman is clear: “Not only does it strike directly at the problem of faith that had been one of his abiding concerns but also, in the figure of the magician, it presented him with a perfect metaphor for himself as an artist.” He also notes that Bergman’s first references to himself as a “conjurer” in terms of filmmaking coincide with his work on The Face, and stresses the historical associations with magic and cinema, including Mèliés and the fact that Sweden’s first cinema houses were apparently built by a Danish magician of the name of Jansson.

103 is the development of a dramatic persona that was initially attached to Ek but which was transferred to a new actor, Bengt Ekerot.

Anders Ek also played Frost in Sawdust and Tinsel, the doppelganger to that film’s protagonist and, as the two films supposedly are part of a commentary by Bergman, one can argue that Spegel and Frost, as doppelgangers, mirror Vogler and Albert, the protagonists (and Bergman's acknowledged alter-egos). Additional factors supporting this reading are the similar structuring found in the roles of Death and the Knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957); Death was played in clown whiteface by Bengt Ekerot and von Sydow played the Knight. One can trace backwards, from Spegel to Death to Frost linking the persona of death to that of a clown.²⁵⁷ This particular subset of doppelgangers was developed through the work of two actors, Ekerot and Ek, both of whom were similarly invested in existentialism and Stanislavski. The actors provided expertise and content in excess of the

requirements of the text and director.