Sweden
The Swedish Royal Theater, or Dramaten, as the owners call it, is not much younger than the oldest Russian theater, the first time it raised the curtain before the court audience in 1787. Its founder, the Swedish King Gustav III, who was, incidentally, a cousin of the Russian Empress Catherine II, was famous as a devoted lover of fine arts, he could be called Ludwig of Bavaria of Stockholm. At the Royal Theater almost immediately opened and school of dramatic art, actively working to this day. One of its most famous students in her time was Greta Garbo.
In the era of Gustav III, the royal stage staged lavish performances in the spirit of French classicism, but from the beginning of the 19th century the theater ceased to be strictly court, it staged works by Shakespeare and Schiller, and plays by Swedish romantic writers J. Stagnelius and B. Beskov also appeared in the repertoire.
The twentieth century passes in Dramaten under the sign of "new drama". And here a special place is occupied by the works of the great Swedish writer August Strindberg, whose name is associated with the heyday of the Swedish theater. It is through his dramaturgy reveals the tendency to deep intellectual and psychological intensity, inherent in the performances Dramaten along with acute social problems. The performances of A. Sjöberg, the largest director of the Royal Theater of the twentieth century, were socially oriented. Along with the national Swedish dramaturgy he staged G.Ibsen, J.Sartre, F.M.Dostoevsky, touching on the problems of interaction between man and history, personality and political forces.
Today, the Royal Swedish Theater is connected with Russia not only by staging Russian classics. Dramaten has brought its productions to Moscow and St. Petersburg many times. Back in the 1980s, Ingmar Bergman's productions of W. Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and A. Strindberg's "Fräken Julie" were shown on tour in Moscow, which allowed the Russian audience to judge the theatrical creativity of the great maestro, who at that time was the artistic director of Dramaten. At that time Bergman's plays struck critics with stylistic contrasts, imperious rhythm and calligraphic precision in details, and V. Gaevsky called his plays "the mystery of our days".
In the fall of 2003 Dramaten brought to the festival of theaters of Europe, held at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg, the play "Swedish Summer Night" based on the play by Erland Josefson, directed by Eva Bergman, the daughter of the great director. The director tried to tell the story of Andrei Tarkovsky's life and creative quest as a parable about the "mysterious Russian soul".
In the fall of 2007, at the II International festival Alexandrinsky, Dramaten presented on October 19 and 20, 2007 the play Macbeth by W. Shakespeare directed by Steffan Valdemar Holm, Artistic Director of the Royal Swedish Theatre. In the performance modern tendencies and stylistic contrasts inherent in the European theater today are acutely felt. The anachronisms, deliberate mixing of different epochs and topical pop art of Holm's Macbeth unexpectedly echo the finale of Bergman's Hamlet of the 1980s, where in the finale Fortinbrass's machine gunmen shot the survivors.