Scenes from a Marriage

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) was not only one of the world’s most important film writers and directors of the 20th century, but also one of the most famous Swedish theatre directors. As he himself often said, he was married to the theatre, while film was his mistress. With his unmistakable introspective auteur poetics – from which the term “Bergmanian” derives – he directed more than sixty films and one hundred and seventy theatre productions. He was the unrivalled master of psychological drama, of whom Krzystof Kieślowski said that he was probably the only film director to have said as much about the human soul as Dostoyevsky or Camus. Bergman, who grew up in a bourgeois environment steeped in religious determinism, did not for a moment feel connected to its traditional values because, as we read in his autobiography Laterna magica, even in his early childhood he displayed a critical distance, doubt and rebellion towards dogmatism. It is therefore not surprising that Bergman’s work is almost inextricably linked with his life, with memories of his childhood and youth, with traumas, intimate frustrations, suffering, a guilty conscience and harsh criticism of himself and others.

When he wrote the script for the 1972 television series Scenes from a Marriage, which he imagined to be “a series of dialogues, nothing out of the ordinary”, he drew on his own marital experiences and, as he wrote, “the absolute fact that the bourgeois ideal of security corrupts people’s emotional lives, undermines and frightens them”.

Johan and Marianne are the perfect duo: they have two houses, two cars, two daughters, two careers. Their marriage is perfect, until one day it breaks down. Bergman has scrutinised their relationship; he has observed how they grew closer and further apart, how their views and emotional reactions changed over the course of ten years, how they went through a wide range of states, from love, exciting attraction, anger, jealousy, cold selfish ruthlessness to disappointment and brutal honesty.

The performance was staged on the Small stage of Maribor Drama by a young Austrian theatre director, the Carinthian Slovenian Mira Stadler (1992), who has successfully established herself in recent years as a promising and talented theatre personality both in Austria and on the international stage. In an interview with Vili Ravnjak, she said that today’s greatly changed attitude towards marriage is linked to the influence of Christianity and the institution of marriage – both of which are losing power – and also to the fact that men and women were not equal in marriage in the past, which has led to an additional aversion. “Our children’s generation will probably be the first to take it for granted that their grandparents are divorced.”

In her article Scenes from a Marriage, or, Love in Times of Loneliness, Vesna Vuk Godina writes, among other things: “The Scenes are just as relevant today as they were in the 1970s, or they are even more relevant today.” In the article, in which she quotes Verhaeghe’s book Love in a Time of Loneliness, Vuk Godina states that the more people talk about their marriage and partner problems, the greater the problems, complaints, disagreements, dissatisfaction and the rest, which proves to a person that they are living in a completely wrong marriage. She emphasises: “Bergman’s lesson in Scenes is clear: peace and satisfaction in marriage, and perhaps in human relationships in general, do not come from conversation, mutual understanding and similar modern market demands and practises. It is not about being heard, but about the two partners supporting each other and thus being recognised through their actions. Not in words or through them, but above all in deeds and through deeds.”

Translated by Benjamin Virc