SOURCE: Rokem, Freddie. “The Black Glove: Wilhelm Carlsson's Production at the Dramaten, 1988.” Theatre Research International 18, supplementary issue (1993): 24-36.

[In the following essay, Rokem follows a production of The Black Glove, directed by Wilhem Carlsson and performed by the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, through rehearsals, noting changes and additions made by the director and cast to better frame the staging.]

On 1 December 1987, the production team for Strindberg's last and least performed chamber play, The Black Glove (Svarta Handsken) written in 1909, had gathered in one of the rehearsal rooms at the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten) in Stockholm. Wilhelm Carlsson, the director of the performance, started by explaining to the producer, the scenographer, the dramaturg, the composer, the actors and the other members of the team who were present, as well as myself who was going to follow the rehearsals, all in all about twenty people,² that he had never directed Strindberg before, except for an exercise with Miss Julie during his training as a director at Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm. His plan was then to present this much more frequently performed piece with an on-stage double bed and to have Kristin leave the room when the relations between Jean and Julie become intimate.

The Black Glove is a very different kind of play from Miss Julie. It has the quality of a fairy tale depicting the mysterious and seemingly disconnected events in a modern block of flats just before Christmas. At the centre of the play stands the trivial disappearance of a glove. But when a woman living in the house accuses one of her servants of theft, because one of her rings has also disappeared, supernatural forces in the shape of two figures, an angel and a puck-like spirit, what in Swedish is called a ‘tomte’, who can help the inhabitants in the house, but who also can, if they wish, disrupt their lives, are activated and take away her child as a form of retribution. The old man living on the top floor of the house, collector and naturalist, who in the end of the play turns out to be the woman's father, and another man, the janitor of the house, living in the cellar, help her to find the glove. And in the glove the lost ring is also found. When the woman regrets her unjust accusations, her child is returned again and they can all, except the old man who has passed away without being reunited to his lost child, celebrate Christmas in the right frame of mind.

The disappearance of the glove and the child, as well as several other seemingly trivial details, like the constant electricity failures in the house, are the scattered fragments of one single, almost cosmic, event, the fragments of which the characters themselves are not able to connect, but which the reader/spectator is supposed to see as one single whole. The play is written in verse and has a distinct lyrical quality, yet it is also firmly anchored in everyday realities. In its poetization of the technical modernities, like the elevator, it has an almost futuristic quality. There have been very few stagings of The Black Glove and Carlsson's production was the first at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.

Strindberg termed The Black Glove, ‘Opus 5’ among the chamber plays, but it is quite different from the other dramas belonging to this group, which express a much more sombre mood of recollection and in which death has almost completely taken over. In Storm (Opus 1) and The Ghost Sonata (Opus 3) old men, as in The Black Glove, also fail to be reunited with their daughters, but in these two plays the bitterness of the old men as a reaction to their loss is much stronger. In these plays there is no reconciliation as in the final outburst of Christian forgiveness which sets the final chord in The Black Glove. What this play has in common with the other chamber plays, though, is Strindberg's fascination with the modern block of flats as a microcosm where the modern technological forces are mysteriously united with different forms of mythic or supernatural forces which supposedly ruled the universe prior to these technical inventions and through them continue to do so.

In his presentation of The Black Glove for the members of the production team Carlsson stressed that the play presents a society where people are not able to meet or to confront each other. In such a world the supernatural forces simply take over and change the lives of the inhabitants in the house. What he wanted to show in the performance was the suddenness with which these changes take place. One moment there is anger, loss or mourning; the next, thanks to some magic intervention, everything is put in place again. His aim was to present and develop a theatrical form which concretized the apparent ease with which these changes took place through the intervention of the ‘tomte’ and the angel. This, he added, is a way to give expression to the inherent magic of the theatre where technology and transformation also have to be brought together into one single whole. Carlsson wanted to use the major theme of the play, the sudden transformations of everyday realities by the intevention of supernatural forces, to make a statement about the aesthetics of the theatre and the potentials of this art form to transform realities through some form of artistic magic and inspiration.

After exactly two months of rehearsals, on 30 January 1988, the performance premièred at Målarsalen, one of the smaller performance spaces at the theatre with a seating capacity of 150 spectators. The imagined bed from Miss Julie had now been replaced by an iron cradle placed at the very centre of the circular stage. This is where the young child sleeps and from which it is kidnapped by the Angel. During the rehearsals Carlsson's general intention ‘to illuminate’ the lives of the inhabitants in the modern block of flats was gradually given a concrete theatrical form. Most of the details of these intentions had been planned at the pre-production stage, but several significant ones were added during different stages of the rehearsals. In this article, which is written a little more than four years after the production itself, I shall only present a few examples from the complex rehearsal process and their role in the finished performance. I shall, however, try to place these examples in the larger context of the director's work with the text, with the actors and with the production as a whole.

When Carlsson agreed to let me be present at the rehearsals of this production I had hoped not only to be able to make a detailed analysis of the performance, but also to examine more closely some of the principles informing the creative processes in an established theatrical institution. Several factors had led my interest in this direction. Most important was probably Wilhelm Carlsson's own background as the founder and director of the experimental group called Theatre Schahrazad which began in 1976, as part of the general rise of small independent or ‘free’ avant-garde theatres at that time, but which was forced to close due to lack of funds during the 1985-6 season. The work of this group, which in different ways had tried to develop and explore the basic principles of the theatrical process not only during the rehearsals but also in the communication with the spectators during the performance itself, had set a very high and sophisticated standard of theatre. The fact that Carlsson had started to work inside an institutional theatre like Dramaten, this being his second production there, raised a number of questions about the flow of ideas and aesthetic concepts between different kinds of institutions, about different kinds of working methods and above all about the place and role of these interactions in the theatrical and cultural milieux of Sweden in the late 1980s.

During the same year, 1987-8, I also followed the work of another Swedish director, Suzanne Osten, the founder of Unga Klara, a theatre, or, rather, a stage affiliated to the municipal theatre in Stockholm, as she directed a children's play called The Aquarium of Toads (Paddakvariet) wŕitten by the Swedish poet Eva Ström. Her whole working method with a losely defined group within the larger institution served as an additional and somewhat different example of the difficult balancing act between artistic experimentation and the relatively generous economic and technical resources of an established theatrical institution, compared at least, to the meagre flow of money allocated to the so-called ‘free’ theatres in Sweden during that time.

It is not yet possible to draw any definite conclusions with regard to how, in the long run, Carlsson and Osten have managed to balance their respective avant-garde temperaments and the ‘necessities’ of the free market economy to which the theatres in Sweden had to adjust during the late 1980s. I want to emphasize though that my examination and understanding of the work in the rehearsal room as well as on the stage when the productions were ready, was no doubt influenced by the general research questions I had raised concerning the complex interaction between experimentation and institutionalization. What I saw was that Osten continued to experiment and research during the rehearsals. She was able to guard the independent status of Unga Klara within the framework of the larger institution and her work with the actors on the text can in many ways be described as a continuing collective investigating process, still very much in the spirit of the group theatres.³

Carlsson, on the other hand, had no doubt adopted what could be considered as an experimental concept of how to play Strindberg, but the rehearsals themselves were primarily devoted to the application of this concept to working methods which were dictated by the institution, the Swedish National Theatre, and the way things have ‘always’ been done there. When a certain actor or actress had problems understanding or integrating the approach adopted by Carlsson, no real attempts to develop the artistic tools of their acting were made, and when such misunderstandings or conflicts arose, the rehearsals were mainly devoted to finding an acceptable compromise which was usually based on the initial concept of the director. This preliminary conclusion, drawn from my own observations and impressions during the rehearsals, does not imply that one of the productions was more interesting, or more experimental than the other, but relates directly to the application of experimental concepts within different kinds of established theatrical institutions.

The ‘official’ rehearsals of The Black Glove took place five days a week from 10.30 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the two winter months except for the Christmas and New Year's holidays. The ‘work’, in the larger sense of the word, was however not limited to these hours, and occupied much of the lunch and coffee breaks as well as other, more unconventional hours. But even if these discussions and consultations solved specific problems, the rehearsals themselves were mostly directed towards the minute realization of the fairly well planned conception of the finished performance.

Carlsson and the scenographer, Charles Koroly, had decided that the whole play was to be performed on a circular stage surrounded on all sides, except for the main entrance and two narrow stairways leading to the emergency exits, by two rows of benches for some 120 spectators. The stage and the seats were to be covered by a transparent roof turning the whole arena into a kind of compressed tower or light house, a cross between a circus and a greenhouse. This basic spatial arangement created what could be called a total setting which closed off the performance space completely from the somewhat larger room of Målarsalen.

According to the stage directions of Strindberg, who had basically written a play within the conventions of the realistic theatre, the first act of The Black Glove takes place in the staircase of a block of flats focusing on a door with a letterbox and a name plate in the background. The second act takes place in the hallway inside the door, the third in the Janitor's room in the basement, the fourth in a room in the loft where the Old Man lives and the fifth in the room of the child who was kidnapped from her mother and is returned at the end of the play. The play was written for a traditional proscenium stage where all the spectators view the stage frontally, with an end-on view of the stage. Carlsson/Koroly, however, had planned a production with only one setting for the whole performance. Because of the arena-shaped stage and auditorium, almost every spectator was going to see the performance from a different angle and the actors were going to be very close to the spectators at any given moment.

The metaphorical description of the block of flats as a ‘Tower of Babel’, repeated several times in Strindberg's play, was the notion which served as the point of departure for this transformation of the basic structure of the stage space. The educated Dramaten audience would no doubt also associate the tower on the stage with the house at Drottninggatan in Stockholm called ‘The Blue Tower’ where the Strindberg Museum is presently situated, and where Strindberg spent the last years of his life and wrote The Black Glove. The circular playing area was also intended to present the block of flats with its basically vertical organization of space, as it appears in the text and in reality, with one floor on top of the other, on a horizontal circular plane. This rearrangement of the ‘lived-in’ space of separate units on top of each other, as in Strindberg's stage directions, to one single circular arena including both actors and spectators was basic to the concept which Carlsson wished to realize with his production of The Black Glove. When the conventional patterns of communication and privacy are disrupted by beaking down the walls as well as the floors/ceilings separating the different flats in the house a kind of chaos erupts which the characters have to cope with. As spectators we are perceiving the events from the point of view of the supernatural characters for whom no barriers exist when they enter the house.

Furthermore, the circular space where the actors are often present on the stage without playing an active part in the ongoing dialogue or action, which is usually not possible in realistic performance, creates many interesting possibilities for building up and structuring the mise en scene. The colour schemes chosen for the performance, ranging from yellow and brown used by the Old Man, the Janitor and the ‘Tomte’, black for the Woman and her two servants and white for the Angel added a dimension of variety to the constant movement on the stage. The idea behind the costumes was that each of the characters was to carry his ‘home’ with him or her in the clothes thus compensating for the fact that there is nothing in the fixed scenery to indicate where their home is. The Old Man also carried a box with his ‘research’ and the woman was always connected somehow with the cradle and these objects also helped to establish their respective homes in the otherwise neutral space.

In terms of the theatrical ideas guiding Wilhelm Carlsson in his work, as he explained during the first meeting with the production team, this spatial concept served as ‘a challenge, a kind of additional resistance, which everyone has to pass through in order to elevate and emphasize the aesthetic dimension of the performance’. In his production of The Black Glove, he thus in many ways wanted to create a ‘group’ work based on the ideas he had developed during the Schahrazad years in productions like Dr Dappertutto (1981) and Faustus (1984), where important parts of the theatrical action were based on minutely directed ‘mass-scenes’ where all the actors participate even if the characters they represent are not directly involved in the stage action but are transformed into some kind of human backdrop which filled the stage with a constantly ongoing, sometimes even ‘mechanical’, movement. This concept of human movement on stage, which has been inspired by Meyerhold and perhaps also by the Bauhaus also influenced Carlsson's direction of The Black Glove.

The first day of rehearsals was devoted to finding concrete solutions or rather concrete ways of behaviour which would make it possible to confront the inherent contradictions between the circular scenic space where the performance would take place and the fictional space where the action of the play takes place, the block of flats. Carlsson explained that there would be a strong tension between most of the things the characters say and what the spectators see. This was one of the basic conventions which the performance wished to establish. When the Janitor is talking to the Old Man in the opening scene saying that he is going to climb the stairs to the attic in order to fix the electricity, we woud evidently see him moving horizontally, not climbing a staircase. ‘This tension must not be shown with mimic illustrations of climbing’, Carlsson emphasized several times, ‘but rather with a kind of suggestion which totally ignores the contradiction and actually uses or employs the kind of “resistance” it gives rise to.’

Several times during the rehearsals, in the beginning as well as towards the very end, some of the actors doubted their capacity to cope with this tension. For others it was a challenge which they enthusiastically accepted. From the point of view of the director this way of working is connected with a theatrical aesthetics where the actor/actress is asked to ‘pass through resistances’ with his/her artistic instruments, the body and the mind. This ‘resistance’, in the positive as well as the negative sense of the word, was from the point of view of the actors most clearly felt when the supernatural creatures, the Angel and the Tomte, entered or were present on the stage. ‘How is it possible not to see the “Tomte” when he is present in the room?’ or ‘How does an invisible creature move around in an apartment-house?’ were some of the questions which had to be solved. Since the play tells a story about the intervention of supernatural creatures, their retribution and the grace they finally give the inhabitants of the house, the physical and psychological relations created between the two worlds, the natural/human world and the supernatural one, was of central importance to the inner life and meaning of the performance.

What was actually shown in the performance was that on the theatrical stage these two worlds can still interact even if the actors as well as the spectators no doubt believe that they are totally separated in the ‘real’ world outside of the theatre, if the supernatural world has any bearing at all on our lives. On the stage it is possible to ‘play’ with metaphysical belief systems to an extent which is probably unacceptable in any other context, except perhaps in a theological one. The supernatural figures in The Black Glove influence the lives of the inhabitants of the house directly, just like the Ghost of Hamlet's father, as well as a host of similar figures in Western drama, intervene in the material world. The meeting between two worlds, the natural/human and some form of supernaturality, seems to be a central aspect of theatrical fictionality and representation which I shall not analyse in detail here. It is necessary, however, to draw the attention to this aspect in connection with the performance I am analysing here.

In order to clarify these problems of theatrical representation from a more practical point of view Carlsson explained that he regarded The Black Glove as a mystery play where there is a heightened presence of each individual character, a kind of intensity, which also influences the power struggle which takes place in the house. This struggle leads to a total crisis in the social texture which in turn results in chaos, madness and death; the disappearance of the child, the despair of the young mother and the grief at the loss of her unknown and unrecognized father, the old naturalist living in the attic. Only when these forces have been totally integrated is it possible to create a new life and to find grace. All the characters, including the supernatural creatures, are drawn into this chaotic situation, and they all have to relate to each other in different ways at the same time as they must play the role which, in terms of the play, they have been assigned by fate. This conception of the play was realized by having many or even all of the characters present in the scenic room during most sequences even though some of them did not necessarily have an active role to play at that particular moment. This, of course, was a violation of the realistic conventions of the play as it was written where the intimacy of the drawing room supposedly protects those present on the stage from the threats of the outside world.

In order to make the description of the mise en scene as clear as possible I shall relate to the circular stage as the face of a clock. The audience entered the arena through a corrid or at 6 o'clock and this was also the point where the human characters made their entrances. This was the entrance floor. The top floor of the house, where the Old Man lived is situated at 12 o'clock. The ‘Tomte’ and the Angel made their first entrances through one of the staircases for the emergency exit, at 11 o'clock, which according to the spacial conventions developed in the performance, was from ‘above’. When I place someone at a specific hour in my analysis I usually mean that this person is situated approximately one meter from the circumference of the circular stage.

The very first scene creates a problem. According to Strindberg's stage directions a glove is lying on the staircase floor. The Old Man sees the glove when he enters and picks it up with his stick. The spoken text starts when the Old Man asks a simple question directly relating to this glove, to which he provides his own answer:

What is this?—A glove? Black, for a lady, size 6: it belongs to the woman in there, I can see that from the marks of the rings; left hand, two straight fingers and one with a diamond ring; a beautiful hand, but with a hard grip, a silky paw with sharp nails; I'll put it on the icebox so that the rightful owner can find it.⁴

(SS 45, 283)

When this line is finished the Janitor, according to Strindberg's text, enters and when he has fixed the electricity he sees the glove on the icebox, takes care of it in order to put it in a place where it can be found.

In Strindberg's text the only two characters present in the opening scene are the Old Man and the Janitor, but Carlsson wanted to create a situation through which already before the Old Man started to say the words quoted above, we should get a sense of the complexity of the life in the house. Thus in the script for the production at Dramaten the first stage direction was changed so that immediately after the entrance, at 6 o'clock, of the Old Man, who was carrying a big box containing his papers and research materials, the Woman and her servant Kristin, carrying a large cradle, entered the circular arena in the same place. Thus, through the pantomimes of these entrances, the spectators were given a basic sense of how the house was organized. The two women quickly walked in front of the old man and arrived in the centre of the arena, where the mistress impatiently ordered her servant to put down the cradle in different places, where a bluish light suddenly lit up the floor for a short moment. This action was repeated three times until she was apparently satisfied and put down the cradle. She had found her home, which on the stage was situated slightly off-centre in the direction of 9 o'clock.

From the very beginning of the rehearsals the two women were told to follow the lights on the floor in order to find their home, signifying that they were in fact led by a force outside themselves which in some mysterious way was in charge of the lighting equipment in the theatre. This device, which emphasized the theatrical dimension of the world in which they lived, was also reinforced thematically by the play itself where the ‘Tomte’ has the ability to cause electricity failures, and as the rehearsals developed, so gradually was his relationship with the theatre lighting and this became an important aspect of the finished performance.

Carlsson's aim was to establish a sense of the ‘life’ in the house and he asked the Woman to show aggression towards the servant by her impatience and by making an aggressive movement with her hand when the servant wishes to kneel by the cradle, while the Old Man who passes by the apartment in the staircase supposedly hears the noises from behind the door. Only when this short pantomime between the two women had been completed was he supposed to find the glove on the floor and ask the question from the first lines of the text. When the rehearsals started the glove was placed at 4 o'clock, approximately one meter from the periphery of the circular arena. But this created a few problems which had to be solved. The glove had to be placed on the floor before the performance started, when the spectators entered the arena at 6 o'clock. But Carlsson was afraid that someone would pick it up thinking that a spectator had lost it.

When the solution to this problem was found the opening sequence of the performance, preceeding the entrance of the Old Man, had the following design: as the spectators entered the arena from the corridor leading to 6 o'cock the black glove was situated in the centre of the stage and it was illuminated by a spotlight. This would prevent us from thinking that it had been placed there by chance, and since it referred directly to the name of the performance it would even serve as a kind of trademark or emblem.

The performance itself started gradually. When all the spectators were seated a few indistinct clicking noises signifying the different activities in and of the house could be vaguely heard. Sometimes the spectators perceived that something was happening and became quiet, but mainly the usual pre-performance mumble continued. The stage action itself started very suddenly by having the ‘Tomte’ jump into the circular arena from the stairs at 11 o'clock. After inspecting the whole arena briefly he discovered the glove in the centre of the stage, picked it up and, made a movement with his hand through which the houselights were put out and placed the glove where the Old Man was very soon going to find it. By this brief introductory mime the ‘Tomte’ immediately became the ruler over the electricity, in the theatre as well as in the block of flats, and the machinery of the house and the theatre could start to revolve.

This was also the principle according to which the performance ended. After the enigmas had been solved and the child had been returned, the ‘Tomte’ appeared with a theatre spotlight in his hand, which had nothing to do with the stylized elements of the stage props, and directed it on the cradle in the centre of the stage. Where the lost glove was found by the ‘Tomte’ at the beginning of the performance, the returned child could now be found by its mother as it became magically illuminated by the theatre light. On the more general level this reflects how the whole performance, and perhaps even the theatre as an art, had illuminated the lives of the inhabitants of the house and the conflicts between them for a few short moments.

From the very beginning of the performance Carlsson wanted to establish the convention that there are connections between the different events in the house without having to point out the direct casual relationships between them. The ‘failures’ of the electricity, the appearance of the ‘Tomte’, as well as the aggression of the woman towards her servant and the glove with the ring which is lost and then found are two different aspects of the ‘workings of the house’. We were supposed gradually to understand from the performance that the appearance of the supernatural creatures as well as the discovery of the family connections between the Woman and the Old Man, which they themselves were not even aware of until the very end, also belong to this machinery.

In the Dramaten production the opening speech of the Old Man, from which the last sentence, indicating that he would put the glove on the icebox, was cut out, emphasizing the convention of interconnectedness. The glove which, as he says, ‘belongs to the Woman in there’ (därinne) was now not directed towards the door of her flat, as Strindberg's text indicates, but pointed directly to her presence in the centre of the arena. And his comment, upon looking at the glove that the beautiful hand to which it belongs has ‘a hard grip’ and is ‘a silky paw with sharp nails’ had, in the performance, just been demonstrated by the woman's aggressive behaviour and by raising her hand as if to hit the servant. In a ‘realistic’ production we have to take his word for it; here, even before the old man comments on her behaviour, we have seen her ‘hard grip’ with our own eyes. The Old Man's comment created an additional interdependence between language, on the one hand, and behaviour and objects, on the other, which was developed on many levels of the production. One could even say that Wilhelm Carlsson brought out on the stage some of the things Strindberg had hidden behind the doors, just as he had wanted to bring out the bed on the stage in Miss Julie. The woman's aggressiveness was further emphasized when she discovered that she has lost her ring and actually slapped Kristin or when Ellen, the second servant, entered and she very forcefully searched her clothes and body for the lost ring without uttering a single word, very clearly humiliating her.

It is worth noting, however, how a director like Carlsson who started his directorial career with a firm belief in the autonomy of the human body as an artistic sign liberated from the linguistic features of communication in his production of The Black Glove takes a clear step in the direction of presenting a logocentric theatrical universe in which language points at the surrounding world through deixis. Deictic language or deixis, as Keir Elam observes, serves as a ‘bridge’ between gesture and speech, and it is perhaps the most direct and concrete way to establish a theatrical situation, a basic relationship between the actor and the space he is situated in as well as the concrete objects surrounding him through gesture and language. The semiotic polarity and division between language and gesture, which in certain aesthetic conceptions of the theatre, which Carlsson also had previously subscribed to, is made almost completely impossible by the opening words of this play. Strindberg's plays are very dense in terms of their use of deictic language. It is of course virtually impossible to find a drama without deictic language, but Strindberg's plays definitely deserve special attention in this respect. In The Black Glove every scene or sequence begins with some form of emphasized deixis which quickly establishes the dramatic situation and explains what is happening.

Except for the opening line of the play some other randomly chosen examples are the first line of the ‘Tomte’: ‘Now I am sweeping’; or the first words of the woman in the play, towards the end of the third act, after her child has been kidnapped by the Angel: ‘Where have I come? / And where am I? / Where did I come from? / Who am I?’ The words of the ‘Tomte’ are very concrete and refer directly to the action he is engaged in and Carlsson decided that he should not be doing his sweeping with a brush. The words of the Woman are more complex because they show that as a result of the loss of her child she has lost contact with reality and, at this point in the performance, the stage was transformed into a dream landscape with cloud formations projected on the floor. Through this device, by literally placing the sky under the Woman, the directions in the fictional universe are further upset. In this upside-down landscape the behaviour of the Woman was clearly understood as a state of madness. The aesthetic-theatrical conception of the deictic situations in Carlsson's production served as a connecting link between the scenic and the fictional spaces which it was so important to create on the basis of the scenery used in this production.

Carlsson's choice of a non-realistic space, with no specific referentiality, made it possible radically to rearrange the scenic patterns of exits, entrances, and character presence on the stage in relation to Strindberg's own text. Instead of having the Woman briefly appear for the first time in the second act, immediately after she supposedly learns that her child has been taken away, she entered the stage at the very beginning of the Dramaten performance and remained on stage until the very end. The Old Man also remained on stage throughout the whole performance, while all the other characters were absent from the arena at certain points. In this manner Carlsson radically changed the sequence pattern of Strindberg's play through which the presence and/or absence of the characters on stage is regulated.

Strindberg sets the short second act in the hallway. The ‘Tomte’ is responsible for shutting down the electricity creating the darkness under the cover of which the child disappears. According to the original stage directions neither the characters in the play nor the spectators are supposed to see the actual disappearence of the child. While a piano from a neighbouring flat, according to the text can be heard playing ‘Beethoven's Sonata 31, op. 110’, which gradually changes into his funeral march, we see the Woman, who, as Strindberg indicates,

listens and is caught by fear. There is a rattle in the icebox as when ice falls down. The cry of a child can be heard. The woman is struck by fear, but stops, petrified. There are bangings in a wall, the elevator shrieks, the surge of water in the waterpipe can be heard; human voices through the walls. Kristin enters. She is pale, her arms are uplifted, her hands folded together. She speaks unintelligible words to the Woman and rushes out. The Woman wants to run after her but she cannot—she falls to her knees and covers her face in a small children's coat which she pats and hugs.

(SS 45, 298)

After this dramatic series of events the curtain briefly falls. According to Strindberg we are only supposed to see the silent, pantomimic reaction to the disappearence of the child, while the event itself takes place, or rather has already taken place, somewhere else. In his version Carlsson radically changed this realistically oriented action and situated the kidnapping of the child in the very centre of the arena where the cradle had been for most of the time since the performance began.

According to Strindberg's text the Angel orders the ‘Tomte’ to punish the Woman for her pride with a short and sharp lesson which will make her behave with more compassion and understanding towards her servants (SS 45, 293). After that the Angel disappears and does not return until the very end of the play when everything has been put in order again. Carlsson kept the speech where the angel gives her orders (DT, 11),⁶ and turned her into an active accomplice in carrying out the deed itself. The electricity failure initiated by the ‘Tomte’ which in the text is only mentioned as the cover for the disappearance of the child was for Carlsson the beginning of a series of events taking place on stage which led to the kidnapping as it was actually presented.

The third act, which follows directly after the Woman's dramatic reaction, presents a meeting between the Janitor and the Old Man in the basement. They are discussing various everyday matters without knowing anything about the tragic event which has just taken place. In the Dramaten performance the two men were seated at each end of the arena, the Janitor in the basement, at 6 o'clock, and the Old Man in the attic, at 12 o'clock, each one in his respective ‘home’ according to the conventions which had at this point been firmly established in the performance. After the short blackout signifying the electricity failure they light their lanterns and hold their discussion about their lives and about the wonders of the technology of modern housing—the elevator, the cold and warm water—over which the Janitor supposedly rules. He is of course not aware of the fact that the supreme rulers are actually the supernatural powers.

While this discussion took place the central area of the stage where the cradle had been placed was in darkness while the ‘Tomte’ was sneaking around it preparing for the kidnapping. Twice during the ongoing discussion, accompanied by strengthened sound effects which represented the gradual breakdown of the different ‘machineries’ of the house, he rocked the cradle and the Woman and her servants became very upset because they had no idea about the intervention of the supernatural powers to what to them seemed to be a regular electricity failure. While the atmosphere became more threatening the Woman suddenly took up her child, a piece of folded cloth in the performance, in order to give it and herself a sense of security, and when she felt more calm she put it back in the cradle.

There is a clear connection between the electricity of the house and the supernatural forces in Strindberg's text, but it was reinforced in the performance by the fact that while we see how the ‘Tomte’ was performing his pranks the Old Man was at the same time praising the Janitor for his control over, what he calls the ‘elements’ of the house. And when the Janitor answered by saying that ‘you honour me too much’ (DT, 16) the ‘Tomte’ quickly blew out the candle of the old man, showing that it was he who was in charge, turned over the cradle and quickly spread out the cloth showing us, like a magician that the cloth is empty.

As this piece of magic was performed the Angel came running in from 6 o'clock with two burning swords. She placed one of the swords in a hole in the floor and she stuck the other into the first one so that they formed a burning cross. After she had made her ‘signature’ in this way she took the cloth from the ‘Tomte’ and ran triumphantly out again. The general pattern of this scene was worked out by Carlsson before the rehearsals started. During the rehearsals he made some minor cuts and rearrangements of Strindberg's text in order to emphasize the tensions between the more poetic or tranquil passages and the short intense sequences of almost hysterical panic.

When the Angel had disappeared with the child Kristin shouted: ‘God help us!’ (DT 16), a sentence which Carlsson added in his playtext, and immediately after that the Woman screamed ‘My child!’. Her short exclamation does neither appear in Strindberg's text nor in Carlsson's original playtext and he added it during the rehearsals because it was felt that it was impossible for the Woman, if she is present, not to say anything as a reaction to her loss. This exclamation thus was her first verbal expression in the play. It was also basically deictic, since she had been guarding her child's cradle since the very beginning of the performance, but ironically she only said it when the child was no longer there.

This central scene in the performance emphasized the complex workings on all levels of the house, the human, the supernatural as well as the technological, and how intimately they are actually connected. This sense of interdependence and organic unity between the different worlds was probably the most significant aspect of Carlsson's production of The Black Glove, and it was the direct result of his decision to locate the performance in the arena-shaped structure. The circular stage was graudally transformed into a mechanism where the lost glove, the lost ring, the lost child and even a ‘lost’ father/daughter relationship were all recovered. The performance showed how these, as well as several other more local mysteries, like the disappearance of the keys, the appearance of the little shoe of a child, and so on, were created by the interference of the supernatural powers and how they were eventually solved. There are many hidden secrets in the house and the supernatural creatures activate the whole process, in fact the whole performance, through which almost all of these enigmas are solved.

One mystery, however, the secret of the world itself, remains unsolved in The Black Glove. It may perhaps sound pretentious to introduce the all-encompassing mystery of creation in the context of a lost glove and other seemingly trivial matters, but Strindberg has fashioned the Old Man as a philosopher-scientist who all his life, with almost Faustian intensity, has tried to solve the mysteries of life. In an argument with the ‘Tomte’, and this is the only time in the play when there is a direct dialogue between representatives from the two worlds, the Old Man realizes that all his efforts to find an answer have been in vain and he wants to die. The ‘Tomte’ even offers the Old Man renewed youth but he refuses. In a last effort to give the Old Man some meaning to his life the ‘Tomte’, who functions as a life-giving force in the play, shows him the black glove, and now the Old Man understands that because of this seemingly insignificant object the life in the house has been totally upset and he returns it to the servant who finds the ring hidden in it. When the reason for the false accusations with which the play started has been discovered the child is returned, the Woman realizes that she has found her father who has just died and the play can end on a note of reconciliation. The ‘machinery’ of the play where the trivial details of the everyday realities and the large metaphysical questions are brought together, has turned full circle.

It is clear that Carlsson started the rehearsals with quite a clear concept of how the finished performance was going look, primarily based on the spatial concept which made major changes in Strindberg's own dramaturgy necessary. Instead of a realistic performance where the characters enter and exit through doors and where the scenery changes several times according to the place of action, Carlsson's performance created an almost symbolic space where the life of the house, as a whole, was contained. This led to some problems on the part of the actors which were solved instrumentally, but were usually not dealt with on a more psychological level. Carlsson explained that his approach was based on his view that the actor possesses in-built resources of experience, that his body has a kind of trans-personal memory, which makes it possible for him/her to work with the role without asking psychological questions concerning the specific motivation of a certain moment of the character he/she is playing. These questions will answer themselves when the mise en scene has been solved, and for this the director is primarily responsible and which is based on his aesthetic concept of the whole performance. According to Carlsson, the physical or even psychological totality which the actors as a group build up has a potential power to create an aesthetic elevation which is realized by their energies and by choosing the circular arena for the production he believed that these energies would be intensified.

The actors participating in the performance have never seen this totality from the point of view of the director or the spectators and it took a long time for Wilhelm Carlsson fully to convince them that this kind of ‘charging’ of energies was possible in the very intimate space which was used. This insecurity, however, led to a kind of vulnerability which paradoxically gave the performance an added tension and deepened the sensitivity of the actors to each other's presence. They gave the spectators the impression that each actor was constantly trying to become more tuned to or aware of the presence of the others and this process did not stop when the rehearsals were completed. In the presence of spectators, at least during the beginning of the run, it was even intensified. It was, however, difficult to say how conscious the actors were of this process, but it seems to me that it created something very interesting and vital in each performance.

This way of working also, in some way, brought out the thematic kernel of the performance as it was formulated by Carlsson. Just as the power struggle between the characters in the Tower of Babel in the play affected their fate negatively, the actors had to watch over what all the others were doing in a different kind of power struggle which he wanted to affect them creatively. This added a metatheatrical dimension to the performance emphasizing the thematic aspects of the theatrical machinery. At the same time though it always left the performers in a situation of which they were only partially aware and which they did not totally master, while the spectators saw a totality, or at least had a feeling they did, because they had seen the ‘Tomte’ moving the glove at the very beginning of the performance, and viewed the performance from the priviliged point of view of the supernatural creatures.

It is difficult fully to reconstruct the totality of my perceptions a few years after the research itself was carried out, but even though it was necessary to ‘leave’ the material for a long time in order to approach it as analytically as possible my final impression was and still remains that the performance of The Black Glove succeeded in creating the kind of aesthetic elevation Carlsson had hoped to achieve. It also revealed some of the more difficult problems that a basically avant-garde director like Wilhelm Carlsson runs into at an institutional theatre like Dramaten, where he is not able to investigate the theoretical issues of his theatrical practice as thoroughly as he was used to during the Schahrazad years. It is almost as if the spirits of Dramaten itself with its established traditions, are always present and can start to pull unexpected strings behind the scenes at any moment. From this perspective the production of The Black Glove can, at least indirectly, be interpreted as an allegory for the attempts of the theatre to try to establish a kind of unity where all the theatrical elements can function as a machinery through which the mysteries of the stage in its meeting with the spectators can be revealed, at least for a short and passing moment.

Notes

1. This article is based on research carried out during 1987-8 when I was a research fellow at the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of Stockholm funded by the Swedish Institute in Stockholm. Besides the extensive notes made during the rehearsals of The Black Glove I have consulted the video documentation done during one of the live performances, photographs and newspaper reviews. I want to thank all the members of the production team at Dramaten, and especially Wilhelm Carlsson, for their cooperation and encouragement, and Professor Kirsten Gram Holmstrom and Professor Willmar Sauter from the Department of Theatre at the University of Stockholm for their hospitality and support.

2. The production was given the following credits in the programme: Director: Wilhelm Carlsson, Scenography and Costume: Charles Koroly, Producer: Agneta Pauli, Dramaturg: Magnus Florin, Music: Thomas Jennefelt, Lighting: Bjorn Magnusson, Production Assistant: Mait Angberg, Props: Stefan Lundgren, Wigs: Sofia Ranow; The Old Man: Per Myrberg, The Tomte: Per Morberg, The Woman: Lil Terselius, The Janitor: Christian Berling, The Angel: Katarina Gustafsson, Kristin: Marie Richardson, Ellen: Lena Endre. In my description of the rehearsals for the production I shall for reasons of convenience only refer to the names of the characters.

3. For a short description and analysis of this production see my article ‘Hur tvättar man ylle i varmt vatten utan att det krymper’, Nya Teatertidningen, 42, October 1988, pp. 34-7. (Swedish)

4. All quotations from Strindberg's text are from Samlade Skrifter, vol. 45, Stockholm 1917. The translations are my own and the references in the text are to SS 45 and page number.

5. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Methuen, London, 1980, p. 73. For further discussions and bibliography on the topic see also Peter van Stapele, ‘Analysis of Deixis’, in Performance Theory: Reception and Audience Research, ed. Henri Schoenmakers, Amsterdam, 1992, pp. 189-204.

6. The quotations from the performance itself are from the production manuscript prepared by Wilhelm Carlsson which can be found at the archives of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. The translations are my own and the references are to DT and page number.