a blog by Peter Leonard
The 2004 production of Riddartornet.
Tonight the Uppsala Literature student association sponsored a lecture by Paula Henrikson on the Romantic author Erik Stagnelius -- specifically, on some of Stagnelius' least-known (and heretofore regarded as least-worthy) works, his three late "horror plays." Henrikson knows these Gothic dramas inside and out, in all their gory savagery. Riddartornet is probably the most well-known today, due to its performance at Dramaten in 2004. Which was actually a world-premiere: the play was thought to be impossible to produce for 182 years. With their themes of incest, imprisonment, insanity, and suicide -- always lots of suicide -- it's no wonder these peculiar exponents of Stagnelius' unsettled mind were long ignored.
But it was one of these black-sheep plays, Albert och Julia that we heard about tonight: a horror-drama about a woman who forsakes heaven to follow her lover into hell. As Henrikson notes, this particular play follows in the Swedenborgian tradition that sees humans as choosing Heaven or Hell according to their own predilections -- and those that chose the latter genuinely enjoying the experience. In that regard, Stagnelius' story ending with Julia choosing Hell is less blasphemous than it might sound. Still, the play was never performed in the playwright's lifetime -- and indeed theater during his lifetime was tightly controlled by the Royal Theater under the influence of the King. Interestingly, the Uppsala student life, governed by the independent provincial Nations, offered a space for performance free from the censorship of official theaters. In this sense the artistic production of a whole generation of Swedish students blossomed under the fig leaf of "theater societies" in a way impossible in the public sphere and in a venue inaccessible to the general public.