Apart from all the usual productions of Peer Gynt, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm and so forth, this year’s Ibsen Festival in Oslo also features Ibsen performed by little plasticine figures…

The theatre designer Inger Astri Kobbevik Stephens travelled to visit kids between 14 and 16 at several Norwegian schools. She boiled down classic Ibsen plots into one sentence (“Girl kills herself although she has everything”, “Mother leaves husband and kids” etc.) and gave them to the teenagers as a narrative starting point. Equipped with a video camera and plasticine the teenagers set about creating, modelling and filming their own stories derived from these premises. Inger didn’t mention the Ibsen plays, so the pupils created without any preconceptions. They modelled their own version of events…

The resulting films are being shown for the duration of the festival in the National Theatre’s foyer, and Inger Astri Kobbevik Stephens screened them at the Open Theatre (Det Apne Teater) as part of a performance lecture entitled Bloody Dramatic Rooms.

Inside little cardboard boxes, lovingly decorated as affluent living rooms with widescreen TVs fashioned out of match boxes, wild fantasies of domestic violence, abuse and addiction take place. It’s revealing that all but three of the fifteen groups (despite complete freedom) decided to stage their dramas in domestic living rooms. The pent up tension of these claustrophobic shoe box homes is in fact quite reminiscent of Ibsen. The way the tension is unleashed though is quite different… There is an abundance of violent humour and graphic detail. The ramshackle plasticine film making is boundless in terms of ambition. In my favourite film for example Nora’s modern-day plasticine husband hacks his way out of the doll’s house with a chain saw. Although most of the scenarios at some point spiral out of control into gratuitous gore, the films are filled with insights into these pupils’ world views and how they perceive “family.” What is starkly obvious is the extent in which TV pervades every aspect of their domestic lives. A TV is featured in every one of the dramatic rooms, as are fathers complaining “you’re in front of the screen” and “shut up, I can’t hear it!” It seems that family life without the TV set has become unthinkable. But it’s not just a physical presence in these films, the vocabulary of TV can be sensed in the making of them. The creators are obviously highly visually literate. They also have an eye for lurid detail and a taste for violent humour. Whilst watching I sometimes think these films are more in reference to movies these kids have seen or series they admire, rather than their own lives in well to do, rural Norway. The “Lady from the sea” film can best be described as Beavis and Butthead meets Ibsen.

So, are these films about Norwegian families, or American families, or how Norwegian teenagers see American families or an assemblage of all the things they fear, idolise or identify with? Whatever the answer (and it’s probably a mixture of all these things) these tiny films seem both harsh and at the same time quite vulnerable. They make for fascinating viewing!

They also seem to suggest that directors confronted with the staging difficulties of say Brand or Peer Gynt should maybe get themselves a handful of play-do : )

Philip Thorne