by Dag Solstad
That is to say, Turid Lammers’s support was a handsome gesture, a mark of favour from the circle’s central figure to her rather anonymous husband when, for once, he needed it. But while respect for Turid Lammers increased, as an argument for staging The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen her support proved counterproductive. Why go overboard? Just because Turid Lammers’s partner had taken it into his head that they should aspire to something higher, were they to put on a play for which they simply lacked the qualifications to succeed? This was what was muttered in the corners, but since a mainstay like Herman Busk was in favour of it, besides a number of others who were also familiar with the sense of emptiness that a successful operetta performance could leave in their minds once the curtain had gone down, and who could also easily imagine, for once, trying to reach for the impossible, it was decided that the Society’s next production would be The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen.
And when Turid Lammers proposed that Bjørn Hansen himself should appear in the role of Hjalmar Ekdal, nobody protested. Apart from Bjørn Hansen. He had not meant to reserve the lead for himself, that was not why he had made his proposal; it had never occurred to him. But his protests, which were quite mild anyway, were simply dismissed – of course, Bjørn Hansen would appear as Hjalmar Ekdal. Many supported him simply because it meant that he would be nailed to the imminent fiasco, made to feel it in the flesh, up on the stage, while it was taking place. This he understood, and that was why he accepted the assignment. The great role of Gregers Werle was intended for Herman Busk, but the singing dentist refused. Too big a part for him, he claimed. On the other hand, he could very well be Old Ekdal, unless they found someone who was better qualified. And so Brian Smith was chosen to be Gregers Werle. With his broken Norwegian this English engineer from the Kongsberg Arms Factory would give a new dimension to the uncompromising merchant’s son from Ibsen’s world of ideas. Dr Schiøtz would play Dr Relling. This, too, was proposed by Turid Lammers, and it was obviously an attempt at wooing the public. A physician at the Kongsberg Hospital appears in the part of a physician in a play – one of Henrik Ibsen’s at that. Dr Schiøtz as Dr Relling, the besotted physician with his clear-sightedness. But Dr Schiøtz refused. Turid put all her charm into persuading him, but Dr Schiøtz refused. Who was Dr Schiøtz? No one knew. He was one of the more serious and unapproachable among the group of homo ludens types that made up the Kongsberg Theatre Society. A man in a doctor’s smock, tall and thin. With sensitive fingers – a pianist? Not as far as they knew, but he was a cross-country skier. During the winter months he was seen early in the morning up in the hills around the town, going at full speed along the plateaus on his racing skis. In the theatre he always played walk-on parts, swapping duties at the hospital in order to appear in the background, as Mr Nobody, in all those operettas. But he refused to be Dr Relling. The woman who was chosen for the part of Hedvig, however, did not say no. For that role a twenty-one-year-old nursing student was an obvious choice, not least because she had such a sweet and childish face. Turid Lammers also made it into the cast. She was to play Hjalmar Ekdal’s wife and Hedvig’s mother: Gina Ekdal.
The theatre director hailed from the capital; it was common practice to hire directors from outside, so there were plenty of them roaming all around the country, staging operettas and farces for local amateur theatres. But tracking down an itinerant Ibsen director was not easy. Finally they found an unemployed director in Oslo. He came up, attended the rehearsals, drank steadily, and can scarcely have remembered anything of it all. On the other hand, Hjalmar Ekdal (aka Bjørn Hansen) did.
To make a long story very short: it turned out to be a total flop. It was an extremely poor performance, and the scheduled six showings were reduced to four, the fourth and last of which had eighteen paying spectators in the auditorium. True, the director was a has-been, and drunk to boot, but Bjørn Hansen knew that they could not put the blame on him; he was simply an illustration of how things were, and how they had been all along. They just couldn’t pull it off. Bjørn Hansen had carefully studied Ibsen’s play, with underlinings, and thought he had understood it so thoroughly that he felt Hjalmar Ekdal’s Weltschmerz in himself. But to no avail. He knew how it should be done, of course, but in practice it became something quite different from what he had imagined. It became clunky. Oh, this naivety of Hjalmar Ekdal, which Bjørn Hansen knew and thought he had made his own – he would defend it and act it out as it had never been acted out before, because it arose from such a deep pain that he could not bear looking truth in the face, his smallness being based on the fact that he found himself in a great tragedy, which had befallen him through no fault of his own. But none of this emerged from Bjørn Hansen. None of this was part of his physical presence on the stage. It did not work. It turned into mere talk. He was nothing but a glum and tedious body on a stage. He made his gestures to no avail. Like the others. Like Gregers Werle, like Old Ekdal, like Hedvig, little Hedvig, whom Hjalmar Ekdal loved so deeply that he could not bear seeing her any more. Bjørn Hansen stood on stage acting a part, rather stupidly, as even he himself thought. The public did not laugh him to scorn, oh no, they tried to encourage him by showing their interest, by not yawning – well, even with tepid applause. But it was not up to scratch.
They couldn’t do it. It was all too clear that this was something for which they lacked every qualification. Bjørn Hansen had insufficient radiance to enable him to make Hjalmar Ekdal’s painful gestures. That was the bitter truth. He had not enough acting technique, and hence no radiance. It is not enough to feel, inwardly. That was demonstrated at the Kongsberg Cinema four times in the late autumn of 1983 (wasn’t it?).
And he had known it all along. He had known it was impossible, nobody can say otherwise. He knew that much about acting, about its being a profession, about art being involved, etc., that he realised he couldn’t possibly create the illusion of being Hjalmar Ekdal. But his desire to do so had been so damn strong that he had been unable to even consider this obvious fact.
This also applied to the others. Neither individually nor as an acting ensemble did they have what it took to perform this world-class play. If Hjalmar Ekdal was tedious on stage, the English engineer Brian Smith was no better as Gregers Werle, and his broken Norwegian by no means elevated his exchanges with Hjalmar Ekdal, in fact quite the contrary, and little Hedvig, who may have been sweet, was unfortunately unable to breathe life into the fragile figure who entered the attic and was so theatrical that Hjalmar Ekdal went rigid with terror during those sensitive moments when they had the large, empty stage entirely to themselves.
Afterwards they were both equally unhappy. The other actors took their defeat with composure, Bjørn Hansen and little Hedvig being the only ones who mourned – Bjørn Hansen in spite of knowing that the big effort he had spoken so fervently of for two years had been impossible for obvious reasons. It had been different with little Hedvig, who had thought it was possible. She was twenty-one, in her second year at the Drammen Nursing School; she had taken the train to Kongsberg for the rehearsals every afternoon, and had then waited at the station to take the last train back to her rented room in Drammen afterwards. What they did not know until later, when it came to light, was that she had taken six months’ leave from the Nursing School and used her student loan of 15,000 kroner to get to know Hedvig’s soul. With disastrous results. Although she had been fascinated by this invented fourteen-year-old girl’s mind – probably because it revealed to her a number of deep things about herself, which she had not been able to convey to anyone, not even her best friend, being so far removed from everyday speech as it was, but which she now discovered touched her in a fundamental way, and had a bearing on her quite frictionless relationship to her own parents – she managed nonetheless to destroy everything by acting in an appallingly stagey manner, and she did not even understand what was wrong, only that it was, and she wept on Hjalmar Ekdal’s grief-stricken shoulders after every one of those four performances. She had continued to live in a fu
rnished room in Drammen, both during the rehearsals and the performances, because she had not dared admit to her parents, who lived in Kongsberg, in a house where her own room was always ready, how much she had really staked on becoming nothing less than inspired by appearing as Hedvig in The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen. And therefore she had dutifully gone back to Drammen and her alleged nurse’s training after each performance, also after the first night and before the first-night party.
While little Hedvig wept on Bjørn Hansen’s shoulder in the dressing room after the curtain came down the first night, Gina Ekdal came in, radiant. Gina Ekdal (aka Turid Lammers) had reasons to be radiant, because she was the only one who had salvaged something out of the wreck of this performance, one might say. Seeing the grief-stricken Bjørn Hansen and the weeping Hedvig, she said, ‘But it went all right, after all, with curtain calls and everything,’ without her forced encouragement helping at all. But for her the performance had been a success; she had taken the public by storm. It made her elated, and she barely noticed that a twenty-one-year-old sweet young woman was resting her head on her partner’s shoulder, for the other actors and the stage crew flocked round her, complimenting her on her acting, which had saved the whole evening, without at all considering that what had saved the evening and made her a success was that she had quite simply betrayed the entire performance by doing her act at cross-purposes to the ensemble. Turid Lammers had been fully aware that she was to represent a female character in an Ibsen play who possibly harboured a sombre secret that caused everything to fall apart, for others. She had loyally tried to bring out the serious nature of Gina Ekdal’s life and secret, without achieving anything but superficiality, and in this perspective she was no better or worse than the rest of the ensemble. But after noticing the lack of response from the audience, she broke away, conferring upon her character a charm that made the public wake up and chuckle with satisfaction. Turid played Gina Ekdal with overdone gestures, with cheap tricks, oh, she wagged her tail and charmed the local audience, which willingly succumbed to her for a fleeting moment.
Bjørn Hansen stood there with his tedious Hjalmar Ekdal witnessing all this. Onstage. With Gina Ekdal. The two of them were the only ones there. In the next-to-last scene. Now, too, when the fiasco was obvious, he yearned to portray this ridiculous figure, Hjalmar Ekdal, for he knew that this character was profoundly tragic, and this had to be made clear. Hjalmar Ekdal was a key that opened the door to some really dizzying questions; his fate had to be enacted in such a way that he could really hold his own against Gregers Werle’s last words to the effect that, if he now, after Hedvig’s death in the final scene, was capable of producing nothing but empty rhetoric, then life was simply not worth living – something that now, when Bjørn Hansen tried to bring out their meaning, fell flat. And there, beside him, was Gina Ekdal in the figure of Turid Lammers, radiant. He went down, but she refused to go down with him. Instead she wagged her tail and for a fleeting moment the audience forgot about this untalented production and allowed itself to be seduced by Turid Lammers. She stole the scene. Bjørn Hansen bravely played on as he approached the end of his project, while Turid displayed all of her charms. She stood there, in the merciful spotlight, a thick layer of make-up on her face, elated at having taken the public by storm, trembling all over, in fact, as Bjørn Hansen, who stood very close, could clearly see. Turid betrayed everything. The whole idea behind the performance, and behind him, in order to save what could be saved. Turid Lammers’s charm was to overpower Bjørn Hansen’s unsuccessful seriousness. It was a violation of everything they had agreed on in advance, and Bjørn Hansen ought to have felt a pinch of surprise at being stabbed in the back in this way. He should have accused her, asking with a deep groan as this was going on: ‘Why, why are you doing this to me?’ But he did not. He did not ask himself why she acted as she did. He only felt relief. Not because she was trying to salvage something from the wreckage, but because she refused to go down with him.
In truth, he had been ill at ease with her eager support of his project to undertake this big effort. There was something about her loyalty that had a suffocating effect on him. It bound her to him at a time when Bjørn Hansen was about to break away. Because Turid Lammers had faded. She had turned forty-four, and it had long been clear that the ravages of the years had left their mark on her face and body. Her face had become sharp, scraped, hard. How he missed the softness of it! But that was gone for ever, and along with it many of the ideas on which Bjørn Hansen had built his whole way of life. He had made his home here. At Kongsberg. Alongside Turid Lammers. He had left everything behind, because he was afraid he would regret it all his life if he chose not to pursue the temptation that emanated from her body and face. Now this face and this body offered nothing but memories of something that had been lost forever, making the whole situation unendurable. He had suspected this for a long time.
Turid Lammers was still the natural centre of her and Bjørn Hansen’s milieu. The circle around the Kongsberg Theatre Society was fairly close, and its core consisted on the whole of the same individuals as when Bjørn Hansen had moved here twelve years ago, though there had been a few changes. Some had dropped out, others had joined. Like the old-timers, the new members also learned to treat Turid Lammers as the natural centre. But she was so in a different way than before, both to the veterans, whether they realised it or not, and to the new arrivals. They constantly crowded around her table, which was still placed slightly off centre, but whereas these meetings always used to end with one man sitting alone with her, in a (to him) dizzying tête-à-tête – although he (and the others) knew it meant nothing except that he was sitting there at that moment and couldn’t hope for anything to happen, yet found it to be enough, yes, enough – now when Bjørn Hansen showed up to suggest that they should go home, there were occasionally two or three gentlemen at her table, engaged in relaxed and cheerful conversation, sometimes also other groupings, like one man and two women (besides Turid), or two men and two women, etc., etc. And while previously the men had looked at her, now they were content to talk about her, albeit with great admiration. Well, they also spoke directly to her, with open admiration for what she stood for, what she was, and for the importance of what she was doing, and not least for what she had done for the Kongsberg Theatre Society. They showered her with compliments, both men and women, old and new members. They also addressed themselves to Bjørn Hansen, her life partner. They let Bjørn Hansen know what a ravishing woman Turid Lammers was. What enthusiasm! What daring! At the outset Bjørn Hansen felt slightly bewildered as he looked into the honest eyes of a thirty-year-old engineer who had just let him know what a ravishing woman Turid Lammers was. So capable! Some also said she was courageous. And fun. And how youthful she was, mentally.
Bjørn Hansen had to stand listening to all of this, not without being struck by a terrible feeling of loneliness. Though they may not themselves have noticed, Bjørn Hansen understood that they were reacting to the established fact that the years had left their traces on his companion’s face and that consequently they could speak about her in a manner that consigned her enchantment to a bygone chapter of her and the circle’s history, and that it was nothing to make a fuss about. He felt abandoned by them. They were people at play, paying homage to Miss Lammers, praising her for her hairdo, her pretty dresses, her importance to the milieu, to maintaining solidarity and enthusiasm, but they did so with a light touch, playfully light. This in spite of having discovered that she had faded. But it did not matter to them; the years pass, as we all know, and with a shrug they left it to Bjørn Hansen to live with her from day to day, now as before.
And Turid behaved as before. She was the same as ever. Made the same well-known acquired French gestures and was still able to draw a man irresistibly to her with her eyes, to be with him now, in the present moment, the two of them only. She was far from without charm and still knew the basic rules of how to attract a man’s attention. But no man was as interested as befo
re in being attracted. If he belonged to the old innermost core, he appeared to join in the game, but grew theatrical, producing a comical, if not pathetic effect. The new men felt embarrassed. They had learned to respect her as an outstanding drama teacher, but they did not know how to react to her unaffected, ingratiating manner, having the effect of an invitation, which in the past they would not have been able to tear themselves away from to save their lives. Previously everyone had known that Turid Lammers, although she flirted, never gave way and remained faithful (to Bjørn), but all the same they found her so attractive that they acted towards her as if they were in the midst of their life’s adventure. Now, however, the new men’s suspicion was aroused when she flirted. They actually believed that she was coming on to them and tried to make their getaway. Bjørn Hansen had observed this time and again. Even at home, in the Lammers villa. Turid Lammers had always dragged men home to rehearse songs. Bjørn Hansen would come home from the Treasury in the afternoon and hear charming operetta melodies through the door of the room with the piano in it, then enter to find Turid Lammers with a male member of the Society. Now as before he could see how coquettishly Turid Lammers behaved, with her attempts at direct eye contact, at closeness – by, for example, patting the man lovingly on the sleeve of his jacket to achieve intimacy, an old trick she had, or a habit – but now the years had gone by and, radiant with joy, the thirty-year-old engineer welcomed Bjørn Hansen as his rescuer, gushed about how much theatre meant to him, to his self-realisation in a hard and materialistic world of computers, grabbed his sheet music from the stand on the piano and rushed out of the door. Bjørn Hansen was left standing there, helpless, alone with his Turid. How he would have wished that this engineer had been so engrossed by Turid Lammers as she sat before the piano, tossing her head back as she looked him straight in the face, that, still bewildered and ecstatic because she had lightly brushed the sleeve of his jacket with her fingers, he had not realised that he, Bjørn Hansen, had entered the room – or, if he had noticed, had pretended not to have noticed in order to savour his last few stolen moments with this woman! If he had done so, Bjørn Hansen would not now have stood there so terribly lonely with Turid Lammers, seeing clearly how her small double chin, her distinct wrinkles, and the dry skin of her formerly soft arms had removed her for good from him.
