Noisy juggernaut – Dagsavisen

 
 
 
 

THEATRE

 
 

“Mysteries”

 
 

By: Knut Hamsun

 
 

Staged by Calixto Bieito

 
 

Director: Calixto Bieito

 
 

With: Jan Gunnar Røise, Andrea Bræin Hovig, Jan Sælid, Heidi Goldman, Mariann Hole, and others.

 
 

The National Theatre, Main Stage

 
 

It should be big talent for disfiguring one subtext so emphatically that all that stands back a literally screaming tacked and chaotic madness that Spanish director Calixto Bieito interprets into protagonist Johan Nilsen Nagel and through him again Hamsun. Now, there is no balanced man in yellow dress one day standing on the pier in the small unnamed coastal town Hamsun describes in the novel “Mysteries.” Bieito Nagel with yellow coat and albeit with hydrocyanic acid in his waistcoat pocket, standing far from Hamsun Nagel.

 
 

Kelleys Nagel is a chimera which moves in Hamsun’s text, in a show seen in retrospective kneeling by the lack of structure and clarifying choices. Sparkling performances and striking individual scenes disappear in the boil of what can best be understood as Bieito selfish homage of his boundless admiration for Hamsun text. Nagel liar, stories and manipulative actions, creating great excitement in a bedroom community who are not accustomed to the dramatic events such as a death, is elevated to a criminal case. Stage design lofty futuristic scaffolding of small rooms and changeable moods around Nagel room constitutes a bastant image on the small town’s transparency. In this conglomerate of a design created by Bieito fixed scenographer Rebecca Ringst weaves truth and falsehood together in a no man’s land, but the mystery and thus also the strong conflicting feelings in Nagel slips.

 
 

Through three rigid hours rolls, runs and stabber Jan Gunnar Røise as Nagel around like a teenager who’d been a favorite case for any scholar of hyperactivity, while he clings to “Mysteries” s beautiful text.

 
 

Only locally works text in keeping with the spirit in which it no logical choices or fines retold by different players and roles. Like when Mariann Holes Kamma comes to visit from Nagel’s past and towards the end, when Nagel timber what he believes is a bottle of poison. When does the chasing directed, as a hint that Bieito expressive theatrical language and playful approaches can be magnificent and captivating. But then it’s too late.

 
 

“Mystery” as a whole is a nag screen cheering, yawning menagerie run by part comedy, part tragedy and part desperation. Neither actors or directing powers to convey the text’s internal energy or history titillating, erotic and not least mysterious force through collusive windmills of absurd estimates. Reinterpretations of classic texts Bieito successfully done in the past, as in “Tales of Hoffmann” at the Opera House and the last two years ago at the National Theatre’s stage, in Strindberg’s “A Dream Play”. The latter was an irrational symbolic and visually stunning quest, which nailed Strindberg’s view of human destiny without losing the author’s intentions on the road. In “Mysteries” however lose Bieito Hamsun, and can hardly anyone but themselves. It is by no means equally interesting.

 
 

Jan Gunnar Røise marathon of a role performance inflates in a flamboyant pace and with a volume that kills text shades. It is also held in the old-fashioned, archaic wording to Hamsun, which cuts in the face of modern profanity and other textual updates. A game alive and good Andrea Bræin Hovig gets little play on the play’s confusing interpretation of the for Nagel significant Dagny Kielland. Instead creates Bieito Marian Saastad Ottersen role as room maid Sara into a promoted fatal-figure who becomes a fulcrum for Nagels liar and his obsessive urge to wriggle away truths.

 
 

The Hamsun person gallery addressed further in some degree by Ellen Horn (hotel hostess), Per Christian Ellefsen (Reinert) and Heidi Goldberg (Martha Gude), but especially the latter’s role emphasizes that he who does not know “Mysteries” from before, or Nagel’s manipulation of Martha Gude, will be wiser after having seen the stage version.

 
 

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Anyone who really reveals weaknesses in Bieito’s interpretation, is Anne Krigsvoll Mrs. Stenersen. In her monologues – especially the one that tells about Nagels violin – are the quivering energy and gravitational pull as the other scenes missing and Krigsvoll alone manages to break through the pompous emptiness that characterizes Bieito directing. Finally stands January Sælid Minutten again as the play’s most memorable figure, a screaming wounds that Nagel with unaccountable calculation rather corrosive stings.

 
 

“Mysteries” on the main stage irritates in all its text young complexity, and the actors have little to set up. Had it not been for that Bieito is Barcelona and a theater world’s most notorious dekonstruktører, one could suspect him to lend a breath or two of the most overextended Harald Eia-sketches on “Open Mail”, complete with nonsense voice and pathos in screams. Only in a sequence, this works exceedingly well and it is in the scene with the drunken festivities on Nagel’s room, simply because it follows a fairly continuous spiral towards the complete breakdown, an absurd scene where guests awkwardly attempting to undress through champagne rapture while discussing Ibsen and with the Nagels and Hamsun agg against playwright, whose plays are “the purely mechanical office work” according to Nagel. But references to Bjornson’s district, about Bieito in our time to say that the only great poet in Norway’s Knut Hamsun himself.

 
 

Bieito “Mysteries” is far from a mechanical office work, it is rather the emotions and admiration that goes in possession not only the director, but also the public. Or to borrow one of Hamsun’s own characteristics of a production of the aforementioned Henrik Ibsen, Calixto Bietos “Mysteries” occur us that “the higher frenzy.”