Wood Painting ( Swede. Trämålning ) is a one-act play by Swedish director and screenwriter Ingmar Bergman , written in 1954-55; later formed the basis of the script for the Bergman film “The Seventh Seal” .
Creating and staging
As director of the Municipal Theater of Malmo , Bergman taught acting class for members of the troupe . For the spring show, he was looking for a short play with approximately equivalent roles, as an exercise in which the talents of ten of his students would fully manifest themselves, but he could not find such. Then the director asked the actors to suggest which roles they would like to perform, and quickly wrote several pages of monologues based on their choice. In the future, this material was refined by Bergman to a one-act play called “Painting on Wood”.
The play was inspired by the fresco "Death to Play Chess" ( Swede. Döden spelar schack ) in the Tebyu Church ( Swede. Täby kyrka ) in southern Småland , made by Albertus Pictor’s workshop around 1480 .
The premiere of the play for a wide audience was held on September 21, 1954 . It was a radio show , directed by Bergman himself, with Gunnar Björnstrand in the role of a squire and Bengt Ekerut in the role of a knight. In the spring of 1955, Bergman staged “Painting on Wood” on the stage of the Municipal Theater of Malmo, and in the autumn of the same year she appeared in the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm (directed by Bengt Ekurut). In a review published in October in Bonniers litterära magasin magazine , critic Oke Janzon noted that this is a strong work, full of humor and deep feeling, which captured the audience. The play was published by Bonniers in 1956 and became the basis for the film, staged in the same year by Bergman.
Place and time of action - Sweden, XIV century. Roles: Narrator, Girl, Yon, Knight, Witch, Blacksmith, Maria, Actor, Lisa, Karin.
Links
- Bergman I. “Wood Painting”: A Morality Play (eng.) // The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 6, No. 2. - The MIT Press, 1961. - P. 140-152 .