Scenes from a marriage

11 years after his French-language production of Scenes from a Marriage for the Theatre of Esch, Charles Muller is returning to Bergman’s play, this time in German, for a co-production with the German Department of the National Theatre of Sibiu.
Scenes from a Marriage started life in 1972 as a television series, consisting of five 50-minute episodes. The series was a huge success and led Bergman to rework the material, first as a film and eventually for the theatre. It was the first time the theme of the „couple“ had been treated in such an innovative, intimate and above all, truthful (honest) manner.
Jean-Pierre Leonardini has written the following about Scenes from a Marriage: „The play is a dialogue between two people, chained together by a social contract called marriage that can turn into an unbearable physical constraint. Marianne and Johan obviously hurt one another, yet we understand that fundamentally, they do so out of love. It would be too easy the other way round. Bergman has put his finger on a sore spot that is a universal reality of western, middle-class marriage.
Bergman’s play has lost none of its power – and it never will; it deals with the eternal theme of relations between the sexes, and adult audiences will undoubtedly recognize themselves in one or another of the exchanges in this marital battle.
The play is exceptionally well cast, with Krista Birkner of the Berliner Ensemble and Daniel Bucher, an actor from the Sibiu National Theatre. Dragos Buhagiar’s set symbolizes the tightrope walked by the two characters.
Just as Strindberg is still played for the truth that cries out from his works, Scenes from a Marriage is produced for the theatre of today.“

18th, 19th October 2018, Esch