In 1973, Ingmar Bergman, the "godfather" of The Swedish national treasure modern film, wrote and directed the six-episode TV series "Scenes from a Marriage", after which he cut the 5-hour TV series into a 2-hour movie and rehearsed the play himself. A series of dramatic conflicts caused a huge sensation, and it is rumored that it even led to an increase in the divorce rate and remarriage rate in northern Europe that year.
In September 2021, HBO's TV series of the same name, based on that year's Swedish miniseries, premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival, re-raising the issue of love and marriage.
At the end of October this year, the emerging representative of China's third-generation small theater "Gulou West Drama" will once again bring the theatrical version of this classic work at the 2021 International Drama Invitation Exhibition of The Great World of Performing Arts and China Grand Theater.
Different from the film and television version of the show, the theatrical version of "Marriage Situation" is directed by Guo Shixing, starring Liu Dan and He Yufan, with a concise stage set, dim lighting, and suffocating dialogue, step by step to explore the true meaning of "marriage" and discuss the universal and profound eternal topics between the sexes.
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<h2>A "God-given madness" becomes "a chicken feather."</h2>
There is no one who does not love romantic love, which the ancient Greeks called "God-given madness." However, when people enter marriage with this madness, they find that things may not be as simple as they were preconceived.
In "The Marriage Situation", John and Marianne have to violently sign a divorce agreement and clean up the chicken feathers.
Stills from the theatrical version of "Marriage Situation"
Wilde said that the shackles of marriage are so heavy that it takes two people, sometimes three people.
In Bergman's original film, the successful, considerate and confident elite husband actively admits to falling in love with someone else, fed up with the boring married life, and wants to find the meaning of his life.
And the wife did not let go. This middle-class "model couple" tore through the veil of decency and warmth and threw the most vicious language at each other:
"I've wanted to dump you for four years."
"All that attracted me was to get out of it all. Do you know what I can't stand the most? All this goes over and over: what we should do, what we have to do, what we have to think; what your mom will think, what the kids will say, all these bullshit things! ”
They are separated, divorced, experienced the reversal of power relations, fell in love with different lovers, remarried, but never found the perfect marriage of spirit and flesh. "The loneliness with her is worse than the real loneliness."
（Scenes from a Marriage，2021）
<h2>Love and separation can come from the same reason</h2>
This work, which was born in the 1970s, is regarded as a classic because it can still cause a topic in today's society.
Sociologist Diane Felmlee has come to an unexpected conclusion after studying the situations that create marital conflict: for people, the qualities that attract a partner to them at first are often the shortcomings that they hate the most.
A female friend of her own complained that her husband never spent the weekends with her and was always busy at work, and when asked what characteristics of him attracted him at the beginning, she said that she was obsessed with him in high school because he was very motivated.
（Scenes from a Marriage，1973）
John recalls the two of them when they were young, when Marianne was full of fantasies, "eccentric and bad tempered", but now he thinks she is "unreasonable".
For Marianne, the young John was mischievous and eclectic, "taking pleasure in making her parents angry" and joining her in the Mayday carnival parade, but now she felt that he was "stupid, arrogant, clumsy, and an out-and-out idiot."
In the opinion of the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, "lack of humor, constant tv, inability to listen to each other, drunkenness ... Men and women give as many reasons as they do for divorce as they did in the first place to bond. ”
<h2>"Bergman's play is like boiling porridge</h2>."
Bergman, the Swedish director and screenwriter, has won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film four times, creating an insurmountable peak for modern art films with a series of classic works such as "Wild Strawberry", "The Seventh Seal" and "Masquerade".
But he has also exposed in his autobiography without whitewash the misdeeds he has committed: "easily" falling in love, ecstatic union, but living a bland and silent family life; then getting involved in a tired and depraved love triangle, developing disgust and jealousy and hatred; finally breaking up or divorcing, and so on....
"Marriage Situation" is his highest-scoring work on Douban, and it is also a cross-examination of marriage and intimate relationships issued by personal experience.
Ingmar Bergman
Director Guo Shixing said, "Bergman's play is like boiling porridge", he interprets the understanding of the script in a concise way, not steaming and frying too hard, nor is it a big messy stew at the end of a pot, but a small fire and slow boiling - after a few hours, the taste is all in this pot of porridge.
Guo Shixing understands Bergman's, the simplified stage set, the anti-dramatic life performance, and the dialogue method of almost the two people whispering are all conveying to the audience: this is not a drama, this is your and my daily life, and we cannot hide the "marriage situation".
Stills from the theatrical version of "The Marriage Situation"
The playwright also arranged a family structure for the couple, old and small. They not only have both parents, but also two daughters.
Although they both have a deep expectation of love and have made unremitting efforts to achieve this, because the pursuit of the two is limited to personal happiness or the happiness of the two worlds.
So even though they live together every day and look like a family reunion, they are isolated from each other and lonely.
<h2>After several adaptations, the issue of love and marriage never fades</h2>
As a core figure in the history of Chinese modernist theater, Guo Shixing can also arouse strong attention every time he appears with his works. When his screenwriter "Birdman" premiered in 1993, many old audiences still recall with relish: "The people who bought tickets lined up more than a mile from the entrance of the Capital Theater and flocked to the newspaper alley next to them. ”
More than a decade ago, he wanted to rehearse "Marriage Situation". At that time, he saw the Chinese translation translated by Yan Hongya, who had participated in the screenplay of "The Juvenile Murder Incident on Muling Street", and was moved by the delicacy and truth of the work, and the dense and appropriate lines were exquisite grasps of the details of married life.
"Simply put, from family to society, we lack an education about human love. What we receive is a right-and-wrong education, what to do when we meet bad people, what should be right, what should be wrong. But emotionally, you can't tell who's right and who's wrong, and that's exactly what needs to be understood and cared for. ”
The theatrical version of "Marriage Situation" set makeup photo
"The Marriage Situation" reveals part of the truth of life to us, but the author does not want us to fall into despair. When drama and life reflect each other, behind the darkness and rifts, fragility and suspicion, can there be a little light of humanity? Is there a simple truth of life hidden in the omnipresent mediocrity? Check out the theater.
It is reported that as the first concentrated performance of Gulouxi drama in Shanghai, in addition to this classic "Marriage Situation", the performance works also include the work "I Am the Moon" brought by screenwriter Zhu Yi and Ding Yiteng, a cutting-edge Chinese theater director, and Ding Ke, a musician in France, as well as the work "I Am the Moon" directed by Zhang Yang, the sixth generation of Chinese film director, and the British writer J. B. Priestley's Visit.
<h4>
Gulou West Theater, a cutting-edge representative of China's third-generation small theater, is a landmark of Beijing drama. He has produced "Pillow Man", "Inspector Visit", "One Sentence Top Ten Thousand Sentences", "The Beauty of Li nanshan" and other works. </h4>
Source: Thoughtful