A Night At the Theatre

In keeping with the unspoken laws of language teaching, my homegroup teacher at the Språkverket is somewhat flamboyant and extremely theatrical. It's fairly common for questions to be answered with either song, cod English accents or exaggerated gestures. A particular favourites of hers is singing the "No no, no no no no" bit from the now defunct dutch music combo 2 Unlimited's one and only hit and renditions from musicals.

Given our teacher's obvious thespianism, there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage of free trips to the theatre, paid for by the SFI programme and ultimately the Swedish tax payer. Not wishing to pass up the opportunity of free entertainment and a break from my usual evening routine, I decided I'd take full advantage of this programme and signed myself up. On Monday night, the hardy souls who were interested (I think there were about 8 of us including two staff members), met at the Bryggteatern in down town Malmö. The site is a restored chocolate factory, which now houses an arts centre for music, dance and theatre. I arrived early, you can never tell what time you'll arrive at your destination with the local bus service, and watched an American and a German dressed in track suits perform a rather strange work out on a nearby set of benches. My theatrically inclined teacher arrived on her bicycle and we exchanged small talk in Swedish about the book I was currently reading and had in my hand.

A few minutes later they opened the door and we went into the theatre and waited for my fellow course mates to arrive. The theatre reception area was lovingly restored from its former use but quite minimalist. The space was divided into a coffee bar and reception desk, and an area of tables and sofas. As the reception area filled up and my fellow SFI course students arrived, we chatted amongst ourselves. Our teacher explained the play we were going to see was about a wedding reception and that it would be about two hours long. Shortly after this brief synopsis, the doors to the theatre opened.

It was a small theatre, with a capacity of about 100 people. We sat in the centre of the seating about halfway up and had an excellent view of the stage. In front of us, was a long table which was under-lit, and a sparse set consisting of a mountain of potatoes and four hot plates on pedestals. On top of each of the hot plates was a pot of gently boiling water.

The play itself, was called "Här och Nu" as was written by a German playwright with the impossibly Teutonic moniker of Roland Schimmelpfennig. It would be performed by a cast chosen from Lund's university theatre studies programme, and was part of their final examination piece.

The play itself was baffling, not principally because of the language, as I found I could follow most of what was being said, but mainly because it had no sequential plot and was highly surreal. In short it was, in my mind, a very experimental and more than a little pretentious piece of work. At the time it all seemed quite deliberately absurd in parts, the cast are all apparently drunk and slightly insane. Although it was strange, I enjoyed the acting and it was entertaining. I imagine the cast had a lot of fun performing it too, and it seemed the perfect fodder for a group of slightly pretentious theatre studies students' final examination.

After the play finished we all concurred we hadn't understood what it was about. Apparently it was just as impenetrable to native Swedish speakers, and confirmed what I'd suspected that although it was well acted (excluding some classic shouty crackers drama student moments), the experimental nature of what we'd seen was confusing.

After I got home from the theatre I googled the playwright and found this summary of the play on the Goethe Institutes' website. It confirmed that the play is experimental and has a deliberately fragmented set of events which may have happened in the past, present or future.

On reflection, although I didn't think much of the play itself, exposure to a language in any form is, in my opinion, an excellent learning exercise. I particularly enjoyed listening to the actors project their voices, and how they ennuicated their lines. I also found it interesting to try and listen for traces of accents. Interestingly, I couldn't hear any Skånsk and they were all very easy to understand.