On the table in front of me I have gathered about fifty books and half a dozen scholarly journals and annually published anthologies of articles and drama series – and this is by no means a complete collection of the scholarly work that has been published in the Nordic countries since the turn of the millennium. In addition, there are numerous projects under way that are well worth including in a description of the present state of Nordic theatre research. How can I present this large quantity of scholarly publications without ending up in a Don Giovanni-like catalogue aria? What kind of qualities do I want to emphasize? Why do I consider some texts more interesting than others? How can I construct an ordre du discours that appeals to non-Nordic readers instead of offering flattering quotations about all of my Nordic colleagues?

To begin with, I will attempt to give an overview of theoretical innovations that have taken place during the last decade. The introduction of various theatrical as well as general theories in Nordic theatre research marks new approaches to a scholarly field that has been suffering from long-standing traditions ever since the Scandinavian theatre departments were founded in the 1940s and 1950s. Not only has this interest in contemporary theory changed scholarly approaches and research methods, but it has also widened the field of scholarly curiosity. The results of this heightened theoretical consciousness are most visible in the analysis of contemporary performances and their aesthetic and social contexts, to which the next section of my presentation will be devoted. A third aspect will focus on the recently developing area of what in English is called ‘practice as research’. In the Scandinavian countries this is usually labelled ‘artistic development’ or ‘artistic research’, and these projects are mostly carried out within the theatre academies and university colleges of acting and mime, dance, opera, directing and stage design – i.e. in educational institutions training artists. The writing of theatre histories has been less affected by new theoretical approaches, but this has proved to be a highly politicized sector of research. Some writers have taken it upon themselves to delve into the political history of theatre, whereas others have been engaged in controversial research politics: who has the right – and thus the money – to write national theatre histories? Last but not least I would like to open a view towards the future of theatre research in the Nordic countries: projects that are under way, tendencies that can be concluded from the present state of the discipline, and finally some more personal reflections and the expectations and hopes of a scholar who began his own academic studies more than forty years ago.

Before I begin my discussion of current scholarly approaches in theatre studies, a note on the term ‘Nordic’ might be apt. ‘Nordic’ is sometimes used a synonym of ‘Scandinavian’, but this latter term applies, strictly speaking, only to Denmark, Sweden and Norway. In these three countries, languages are spoken that are mutually understandable – at least in the academic context. This means that Scandinavian scholars read Danish, Swedish and Norwegian books and dissertations, participate as examiners in each other's countries and keep updated with national journals and so on. In reality, Iceland also belongs to Scandinavia, but its language is not readable without special linguistic competence. Finland is certainly a Nordic country, but the Finnish language is completely different from the Scandinavian languages. Although a minority of Finns speak Swedish as their mother tongue, the vast majority of the inhabitants of Finland grow up in the Finno-Ugrian idiom that has no similarities with Indo-Germanic languages. In other words, Finnish texts are not accessible outside Finland unless one has thoroughly studied this language.

In recent years, the Association of Nordic Theatre Scholars has expanded its membership to the Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This is not due to any linguistic ties – the Baltic languages are different from each other and only Estonian is related to Finnish – but there are some close historical relations between Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltic countries. Just to give one example, the University of Tartu was founded in 1632 by the Swedish king Gustav II Adolf (the same year that he was killed in a battle of the Thirty Years War), when this Estonian city still carried its German name of Dorpat.

These linguistic differences will certainly influence my presentation. Unable to read Icelandic, Finnish or the Baltic languages, I am limited to publications from these countries in English, French or German. Doctoral dissertations usually include a summary in one of these languages, which gives a glimpse of their content, but not access to the full work that has been achieved. In the end notes, I will only provide bibliographical details to international publications, as publications in Nordic languages are easily accessible to readers who manage the local library catalogues. Although I have asked friends to support my endeavour to get an overview of Nordic theatre scholarship, the unavoidable bias – with an additional focus on my own department in Stockholm – is entirely my own responsibility.

Theoretical trends

Similar to the development of theatre research in an international perspective, Nordic scholarship has been heavily influenced by theoretical developments and tendencies that have emerged in all the disciplines of the humanities at Western universities. Among the numerous theories that have been celebrated during the last decade or two, I will begin with gender studies. Since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble was published in 1990, no scholar with serious ambitions has been able to avoid relating to this and her subsequent books. A scholar who picked up these ideas early on is Tiina Rosenberg, who transformed Butler's gender strategies into applicable theories for Swedish theatre students. In a series of books, she developed an agenda of queer perspectives that were at once research tools and political activism. During her time of teaching and tutoring at Stockholm University (since 2006 she has been professor of gender studies at Lund University), queer studies became an integrated part of theatre and gender studies, which was reflected in numerous student essays and dissertations. These directions also triggered studies on men and masculinity – such as Dirk Gindt's recent dissertation, Playing Activists and Dancing Anarchists,Footnote ¹ to which I will return later – as well as analyses of plays and operas, stand-up comedies, drag shows, individual artists and a Swedish edition of seminal Butler texts.Footnote ² Additionally, Sue Ellen Case, who taught in Stockholm in the mid-1990s, had a strong influence on the renewal of feminist theory that has reverberated in many dissertations. Eve Sedgwick Kosofsky, Laurence Senelick, R. W. Connell and David Savran are other references that frequently appear in recent theses and articles. Gender perspectives are today firmly established in many Nordic theatre research environments, in the same way as they are in adjacent areas such as media and film studies, fashion studies, ethnology, philosophy and so on.

In a similar manner, a number of other theoretical approaches have made their way into theatre studies. Psychoanalysis, mainly in the version represented by Jacques Lacan, has for many years been an important source of inspiration for theatre scholars. In September 2008 a conference was held in Stockholm in honour of Sven Åke Heed, primum mobile of Lacanian analysis of plays and characters, with contributions from various Scandinavian scholars, which have been published in Swedish to inspire coming generations. But psychoanalysis has not only served to analyse fictional figures; additionally, the question of a psychic room of performance, an inner stage for performers and spectators, is also under development, for example the creation of a Baby Drama for spectators less than one year old. Baby Drama was written by Ann-Sofie Bárány and directed by Suzanne Osten, and constitutes part of the dramatist's Ph.D. dissertation at Stockholm University.Footnote ³ Scripts, performances and reception studies might all take advantage of psychoanalytical perspectives.

Lacan belongs to a field that is nowadays often called French Theory. This is predominantly an American expression, since there has never been such a movement in France, but the impact of a whole generation of French theorists cannot be denied. In the Nordic countries, too, the ideas of Michel Foucault, Jacques Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida have produced fruitful discussions about the nature of aesthetic studies altogether. Whether we speak of Foucault's discourse of cultural histories, Deleuze's and Guattari's rhizomes, Bourdieu's social or cultural capital and his notion of segmented fields, Derrida's différance or Lyotard's postmodern condition,Footnote ⁴ these issues have all been taken into consideration by many Nordic scholars. One theoretician of theatre studies might nevertheless be named in this context, because he has, maybe more thoroughly than anyone else in this discussion, penetrated the queries of these French (and German) theories. I am thinking of Niels Lehmann from Aarhus University in Denmark, who in his article ‘On Different Use of Difference’Footnote ⁵ has discussed the complex interaction between these thinkers, also employing their theoretical insights for developing alternative views of performativity to those presented by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Josette Féral.Footnote ⁶ In this context, Lehmann engages in theoretical discussions at the forefront of contemporary international theatre studies.

In her dissertation, entitled The Aesthetics of Movement, Camilla Damkjaer has delved into the aesthetics of theatre and dance, juxtaposing the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze with the choreographic work of Merce Cunningham.Footnote ⁷ This also represents a new type of academic approach, in which theory and physical movement illuminate and mutually impact on one another. This dissertation was written in the context of a double-tutoring agreement between Stockholm and Paris 8, a so-called co-tutelle agreement, which rendered the defendant a Ph.D. in both Sweden and France.

Dance as a specialized branch of theatre studies has been established in the Nordic countries step by step. In Stockholm, dance has been taught in the framework of the Theatre Department since 1988, whereas the Nestor of dance studies in Copenhagen, Erik Aschengren, was located at the Institute of Nordic Languages. Today, a network of masters studies includes, besides Stockholm and Copenhagen, Trondheim in Norway and Tampere in Finland. Scholars from these departments have recently received a major grant for Nordic studies in dance. The driving force behind a theoretical renewal in dance studies has been professor Lena Hammergren from Stockholm, whose article ‘The Re-turn of the Flaneuse’ – borrowing the notion of the flâneur from Walter Benjamin to create a feminine-gendered researcher who strolls through 1930s modernism on display at the Stockholm Exhibit – has had a major impact on the theoretical orientation of dance studies in the Nordic countries.Footnote ⁸ Dance studies have progressed rapidly, and in Stockholm the department is now called Theatre and Dance Studies.

One more general aspect of studies of cultural phenomena should be mentioned, namely postcolonial studies, which in its Scandinavian context has assumed international prominence, even though some of its texts only exist in Scandinavian languages. A Swedish scholar, Christina Nygren, who is presently the vice-president of the International Federation of Theatre Research, has for a number of years studied the popular forms of theatrical entertainment in Japan, China, Bangladesh and India, which have rarely been examined even by domestic scholars. In two thick volumes she has investigated ‘travelling theatres, religious festivals and popular contemporary amusements’ in these countries, and it is a pity that only a minor selection of these Swedish books from 2000 and 2006 has appeared in English.Footnote ⁹ Christina Nygren is, however, not the only Nordic scholar engaged in so-called Third World issues. Among many others I want to mention are the Danish scholar Karen Vedel, who has been writing on trance dance in South Africa, and Ola Johansson, who studies community theatre groups' fight against AIDS in Tanzania.Footnote ¹⁰ This interest beyond Western theatre cultures has successively increased within the Nordic research community over the last thirty or so years.

Whereas these general theoretical directions might be noticeable in many Western theatre departments, there are other, more theatre-related, theoretical developments that have also reverberated globally, namely the issues of performativity and theatricality. These topics have been under intensive discussion in seminars and at conferences.Footnote ¹¹ During 2006 and 2007 the Danish scholarly journal Peripeti devoted two issues to performativity and theatricality respectively.Footnote ¹² Here, a number of contributors have attempted to translate the international discourse to their own context, but have also added substantial ideas of their own, for instance how we might be able to distinguish between the theatrical, theatricalization and theatricality. Unfortunately, Peripeti, just like the Swedish Visslingar och rop and the Norsk Shakespeare- og teatertidskrift are journals in Scandinavian languages. The only periodical in English is Nordic Theatre Studies, which has appeared as the yearbook of the Nordic association of theatre scholars since 1989.

These theoretical discussions are also reflected in many dissertations, such as Dirk Gindt's aforementioned work on men and masculinities and in the ongoing project by Masha Berlova – another co-tutelle student of Stockholm and Moscow – concerning the theatricality at Gustav III's eighteenth-century court. Of course, these discussions are not new as such, but in their special applications, in terms of gender studies and in relation to Jury Lotman's Russian texts on the theatricalization of the rococo courts of Eastern Europe, these projects certainly help to illuminate complex theoretical concepts that are central to the field of theatre studies.

Theatre as event

The theatrical event as a holistic concept is an original Nordic contribution to the theoretical diversity of theatre studies. It has been developed over the years at Stockholm University and further diversified by a Working Group of the International Federation of Theatre Research since 1997. Of course the notion of theatre as event has been mentioned in many earlier texts, but a consistent theoretical model of a theatrical event was introduced in a number of steps by the author of this article.Footnote ¹³ The first attempt was directed towards a model of the relationship between performer and spectator, distinguishing between sensory, artistic and symbolic levels of communication. These levels constitute the nucleus of ‘theatrical playing’, which in turn is related to a ‘playing culture’. Together with the ‘cultural context’ and the ‘contextual theatricality’, these four entities are located around a circle and connected to each other in a diamond-shaped figure. This concept of a circle with the four components as simultaneous factors of a theatrical event has proved to be quite useful in practical research.

The model of the theatrical event has been applied in a number of dissertations and books. At Stockholm University Rikard Hoogland was the first to make use of the event model in his analysis of theatre politics in Sweden, to be followed by Dirk Gindt in his dissertation on the masculinity displayed in political demonstrations. Heli Altonen from Åbo Academi, the Swedish-language university in Turku, Finland, featured the four components as headlines for the main chapters of her dissertation.Footnote ¹⁴ In a similar way, John Tulloch made these components the cornerstones of his book on productions of plays by Shakespeare and Chekhov.Footnote ¹⁵ Additionally, the experienced producer and scholar John Russell Brown found the approach interesting, joined the IFTR working group and published a book entitled Shakespeare and the Theatrical Event.Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, numerous young scholars in various parts of the world have taken advantage of the model.Footnote ¹⁷ The concept of the theatrical event focuses on the ‘eventness’ of theatrical encounters, on the mutuality of the communication between performer and spectator, and on their interaction with other playing cultures on the one hand and with organizational and aesthetic conventions on the other, while relating all these circumstances to various cultural contexts. This makes the complex process of creating and experiencing theatrical events graspable, and organizes the different components in a non-hierarchical way. My introductory book in English, simply called Eventness, has recently been reprinted.Footnote ¹⁸

These discussions on performativity, theatricality, liveness and eventness have all contributed to expanding the scope of theatre studiesFootnote ¹⁹ – as we still prefer to call the discipline in the Nordic countries, despite occasional temptation to switch to the Anglo-Saxon term ‘performance studies’ used for example in Copenhagen, where the department will be renamed Theatre and Performance Studies. Some titles, which already have been mentioned, reflect the expansion into studying political demonstrations, parliamentary sessions, military parades and other non-theatrical ‘theatrical’ events. Another expansion is characterized by an increasing interest in art, especially installations and interventionist art practices that can be viewed through theatrical lenses.Footnote ²⁰ In addition, studies of drag performances focusing on the eventness of the public encounter have to confront broader issues than the mere fact that men perform as women or vice versa, as Kalle Westerling's La dolce vita argues. The whole postdramatic experimentation that Knut Ove Arntzen from the University of Bergen describes as ‘marginal theatre’ easily fits into the idea of events and encounters, without having to leave traditional aesthetic interests aside. Marjana Johansson from the School of Economics in Stockholm has presented a dissertation on how cultural events are used in expanding business marketing.Footnote ²¹

Performances and contexts

Obviously, these recently developed theoretical tools are most frequently applied to the analysis of contemporary theatre. Some of these theories are neatly and pedagogically presented in the introductory book on performance analysis by Michael Eigtved, who teaches theatre studies at Copenhagen University.Footnote ²² The students are introduced to the elements of a theatrical performance and made familiar with a series of communicative and interpretative models. Most departments in the Nordic countries teach performance analysis and this also results in the occasional dissertation or essay on a specific production.

Although performance analysis has expanded rapidly, studies of the audience's response to performances are rare. Reception research was well established in the 1980s, but only recently has a renewed curiosity towards the spectator's ‘real’ experience been noticeable, both internationally and in the Nordic countries. I will limit myself to one example that reaches far beyond the old-fashioned demographic questions: Yael Feiler's investigation of the effects on the spectator's anti-Semitic sentiments caused by productions of The Merchant of Venice. This play was produced by the Swedish director Mats Ek at the National Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm in 2004. While the production was hailed as outstanding by critics and audiences, some argued that the it promoted anti-Semitic sentiments. This was fervently denied, so Yael Feiler decided to investigate the case. She developed a questionnaire in which the spectators answered the same questions before and after a performance – a method that originally was designed by the Israeli scholar Anat Gesser-Edelsburg. In this way, the spectators' possible change of attitude towards Jews during the performance itself would become visible.Footnote ²³ And it did! One out of four spectators had changed his or her mind in terms of higher prejudices against Jews. In addition, Feiler has compared the outcome of the Swedish production with results from the same questionnaire handed out to the audiences of different productions of the same play at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and also in a rural town in central Sweden, where the play was performed during the summer of 2006. This comparative study shows what impact different productions have on the differences in their reception – and what can be seen as constant features due to the character of Shakespeare's play.

The qualities of performances are not simply the outcome of aesthetic values, but are closely related to the attitudes and norms that are represented in a society. A scholar who has studied the relationship between art and society over many years is the Danish professor of theatre studies at Aarhus University, Jørn Langsted. After numerous studies on children's theatre, theatre organizations and theatre politics in the Nordic countries, he published a seminal book on the problems of the quality of theatre.Footnote ²⁴ Quality is here considered as a question both of theatrical productions and of the public reception of theatrical events. In a Festschrift for Jörn Langsted from 2005, his friends have illuminated his achievements from many angles and one can only hope that his work will be translated into languages that can be read outside Scandinavia.

Langsted's long-standing interest in theatre produced for children has not only inspired scholars at his own university, but has spread throughout the Nordic countries. In Stockholm, Karin Helander has made children's theatre one of her specialities, which has resulted in important books on the history of children's theatre, on drama for children and on the discourse of childhood that so strongly influences the general attitude towards what is thought to be useful for children: entertainment, pedagogy or art.Footnote ²⁵ Karin Helander teaches both in theatre and dance studies and at the Centre for Research of Children's Culture at Stockholm University, which also publishes a yearbook on issues related to the cultural environment of children. She has served as adviser for a number of dissertations, and for doctoral students at other universities, and through her engagement with the National Cultural Council she has been able to stand up for children's theatre in Swedish cultural politics. Closely related to children's theatre is of course pedagogical drama, a domain to which the universities of Aarhus, Stockholm, Trondheim and Turku have contributed with prominent research.

It is in a way surprising that the general interest in the cultural context of theatrical events has been rather low during recent years. Langsted's work and the dissertation by Rikard Hoogland, which investigated central cultural politics and their implementation in the countries concerned, remain exceptions. When issues of cultural politics have been studied at all, they are mainly focused on theatre history. Maybe the relatively stable politics in the Nordic countries fail to provoke specialized studies on theatre organizations, free groups, national theatres or local political strategies.

Practice as research

The first Nordic institution to offer doctoral studies for theatre artists was the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. Already in the 1990s, some dissertations were written there, in which the practical production of a play was an integral part of the outcome of the research. Although the results were strongly debated, the Finnish theses opened an alternative to traditional academic theatre research. Under the guidance of Pentti Paavolainen – himself an academic – new projects were launched under the umbrella of practice as research. Within Nordic theatre research they certainly constituted a novum that has come to stay. And the Finnish approach has spread to the other Nordic countries.

From a Swedish perspective, two important developments have changed attitudes towards practice as research, both related to traditional research policies. According to Swedish regulations, only universities can offer doctoral degrees, which excludes the university colleges of practical theatre education from providing advanced academic exams. The students from these colleges can either join the doctoral programmes of a university department – as has been the case in Stockholm – or they can become an ‘artistic faculty’ as has been the case at Gothenburg University. A third possibility has been to enrol at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. These new openings have been successful and projects have been carried out – such as Kent Sjöström's dissertation on actors' training, which was a collaborative project between Malmö and Helsinki (2007). Åsa Unander Scharin recently defended her dissertation on animation and dance at the Technical University of Luleå. Per Zetterfalk from Dramatiska Institutet, a college in Stockholm for directors, set designers, dramaturges and make-up artists, presented his doctoral study on the writings of Swedish dramatist Lars Norén. Cecilia Lagerström, with a ‘regular’ Ph.D. from Theatre and Dance at Stockholm University, continues in a postdoctoral project at the artistic faculty in Gothenburg the experimental approach that characterized her dissertation.

Furthermore, the Swedish National Council of Research has received special resources to promote artistic research, open to applications from research-interested artists. This has resulted in at least two projects that have been publicly presented. One was carried out by the experienced actor Leif Sundberg, who had experimented with The Language of Theatre, and who published a book in Swedish on the central terminology of acting. The equally well-respected director Suzanne Osten published her and My Walter's experiments with masks on a DVD, complemented with a collection of articles by academics and artists who had participated in their experiments. To what extent these books and images can be labelled ‘research’, or whether they just constitute references to practical experiences, can of course be debated, but these projects no doubt express an ambition to include artistic knowledge as a form of research. In 2007 was launched a joint project of all Swedish Academies of Acting and Mime, due to end in 2009, aiming at the improvement of presentations of gender. Elaine Aston's article ‘Knowing Differently: “Practice as Research” and the Women's Writing for Performance Project’, presented at the sixtieth anniversary of Theatre and Dance Studies at Stockholm University and printed in the latest issue of Nordic Theatre Studies,Footnote ²⁶ also marks the current Nordic interest in the experiences that British scholars have accumulated in this area. Baz Kershaw, another major English practical scholar, has repeatedly been invited to speak in Sweden. Practice as research is a growing interest among Nordic artists and academics.

In line with these moves towards closer ties between research and practice, the number of books on particular artists' ideas about theatre aesthetics and techniques is also growing. Two recent titles indicate this trend: Tiina Rosenberg has published a book containing conversations and interviews with Suzanne Osten, the Swedish director who not only revolutionized children's theatre, but has worked with a consistent feminist outlook during the last forty years, and Hannes Meidal has collected the numerous articles that the late actor Keve Hjelm published over the years, defending the actor against the superiority of the director in theatrical productions. As a professor of acting at the Academy of Mime and Acting in Stockholm, Hjelm provided a generation of new actors with alternative strategies to building a character. From a research point of view, these collections are most valuable materials for both practitioners and scholars. In an ongoing project called The National Dramaturgy, two scholars from Stockholm University are examining women dramatists from the late nineteenth century. This project is carried out in close cooperation with a number of Swedish theatres, where some of these ‘forgotten’ dramas have been successfully staged or presented as readings.

Theatre histories

After a long period of negligence, theatre history has once again surfaced as a major area of scholarly interest. While the ‘grandfathers’ of theatre studies saw historical studies as the only option for the then young discipline, semiotics and post-structural theory focused almost entirely on contemporary performance. During the last decade, a new and (partly) vital fascination with historical topics has become noticeable in Nordic theatre research. But different – and sometimes opposing – strategies can also be distinguished.

What I will present in the ensuing paragraphs can briefly be summarized in the following way: there are monographs on the aesthetics of historical theatre periods, personalities, and genres; re-evaluations of politically controversial instances in theatre history; new theoretical approaches to historical problems; and finally a relapse to traditional canonized storytelling. An interesting diversity, indeed.

To begin with, the quantity of new books on historical phenomena in the Nordic countries can be addressed. Let me begin with a biography of Betty Nansen, a magnificent actress on the Danish stage in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, written by the Copenhagen professor emerita, Kela Kvam. This book continues a series of portraits of exceptional actresses in the Nordic countries. The American scholar Carla Waal devoted a study to the Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse – the third wife of August StrindbergFootnote ²⁷ – and Jón Vidar Jónsson focused on the Icelandic phenomenon Stefanía Gudmundsdóttir – known as Fru Stefanía in his book published in 1996. These three actresses were all national equivalents to Sarah Bernhardt, playing the same characters in the same style as the great Parisian idol. Although written into the tradition of heroic protagonists, these critical biographies aimed at placing Nordic acting alongside the mainstream of European achievements in terms of women's histories in a male-dominated art.

Hans Ojmyr focused his 2005 dissertation, from the Department of Art History at Stockholm University, on the stage design of the Royal Theatre (the Opera). This work also placed the ambitions of stage designers in Stockholm within the framework of European traditions. Additionally, Magdalena Holdar's dissertation from the same department, called Scenography in Action,Footnote ²⁸ engaged with more recent history, focusing on space, time and movement in Ingmar Bergman's theatre productions; it followed a strong interest in set design that this department has shown since Eva Sundler's 1975 dissertation on Isaak Grünewald's sets from the 1920s. Holdar's analysis very clearly shows the interrelationship between the scenography onstage and the actors' movements that Bergman's dynamic productions created in plays like A Doll's House, Madame de Sade, Long Day's Journey into Night, A Winter's Tale and so on.

Holdar's thesis is one among many books on the late Ingmar Bergman, thus bridging the gap between historical and contemporary theatre. What she analyses as historical performances, many of my generation still preserve as vivid memories. This is typical of research on Ingmar Bergman, who died in 2007. Antonello Motta – another co-tutelle student, of Torino and Stockholm – recently presented a dissertation in Italian, which in English translation reads: ‘The Face of the Poet behind the Mask of the Architect: Ingmar Bergman's Ibsen Productions’.Footnote ²⁹ Motta not only analyses a number of Bergman's Ibsen stagings, but traces the historical contexts in which these productions took place as well. This also includes the impact that prominent figures in Swedish theatre history, such as Olof Molander, Alf Sjöberg and Torsten Hammarén, have had on Bergman's directing skills. Furthermore, Motta also sees the impressions that Bergman made on the younger generation of Swedish directors. Rikard Loman from the University of Lund has written a dissertation on Ingmar Bergman's production of A Winter's Tale (2005). Film professor Maaret Koskinen has shed a different kind of light on Bergman in her books on Bergman the author and his early writings (2002) and the process of creating the most theatrical his films, Fanny and Alexander (2005). Theatre critic Henrik Sjögren has produced a more catalogue-like summary of Bergman's theatre production between 1938 and 2002. In other words, the internationally best-known Swedish director's theatre productions have finally attracted scholars from different disciplines and from different countries.

There are, however, other directors to be discovered in the Swedish theatre landscape. Karin Helander wrote earlier about some remarkable directors from the 1920s at the Opera, Harald André and Harry Stangenberg, who introduced a new style of staging operas in Sweden. Typically, her book was called Opera as Theatre (1993). She followed this trail in a monograph about Bengt Ekerot's productions in the 1950s. Ekerot was not only an actor in many of Bergman's productions, but also a prolific director of many of the new American plays that reached Europe after the Second World War. The peak of his ambitions was certainly the world premiere of Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey into Night in 1956 at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.

Numerous scholars from other academic environments have contributed to theatre studies. As examples I want to mention a 2006 volume of 350 pages, edited by Torsten Pettersson (in Swedish) and called (in translation) Opera Worlds, with the subtitle From Monteverdi to Gershwin indicating the broad approach that the twenty authors – among them five members of the Stockholm theatre department as well as musicologists and literary scholars – have taken towards this theatrical genre. Gunnar Petri, long-lasting director of the association of copyright owners in music, recently defended a dissertation at the law school at Uppsala University about the breakthrough of author's rights (2008). Professor of Greek at Stockholm University, Eva-Carin Gerö frequently uses references to antique drama productions as illustrations in a book on Greek culture and language (2008). Philosophical reflections about some of Bertolt Brecht's central plays can be found in a book by literary scholar Richard Schönström, entitled A Taste of the Future, indicating that Brecht is far from being dated (2003). Bo Sjökvist has published a book presenting interviews with ageing striptease dancers, magicians and other artists performing in the market shows of the 1950s and 1960s and earning Sweden the reputation of a sexually liberated society (2006). While these contributions to theatre history are brought forward from unexpected and scattered scholarly directions, fascism and the Nazi occupation in the 1930s and 1940s are recurring issues that has been and no doubt will be dealt with again and again.

Scandinavia and Germany

On 7 October 1942 theatre director Henry Gleditsch was shot dead by a German execution squad in the Norwegian detention camp Falstad. Gleditsch had been arrested the previous day, most probably – there was never a trial against him, thus no documentation – because he obstructed the ambition of the occupation force to make the theatre in Trondheim a loyal instrument of the ‘new’ Norway. Thoralf Berg from the University College of Mid-Norway has published a wonderful little book to commemorate this hero of the Norwegian resistance, a theatre director and actor, who stood up for his country's independence and paid a high price. Berg's account of Gleditsch's background, achievements and death is a traditional, but worthy, volume of theatrical history.

While Norway suffered from the German occupation, Finland was drawn into the Second World War on several occasions. The Finnish enemy, however, was not Germany but the Russians. On the contrary, Finland had strong ties with Germany, both before and during the war. This relationship is still controversial in Finnish historiography and recently even the cultural aspects have been researched. Hella Wuolijoki is internationally known mainly for her collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, in particular their joint play, Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti from 1941. Five years earlier, in 1936, Hella Wuolijoki had written a play, The Women of Niskavuori, which was extremely successful both in Finland and abroad. Four more plays about the generational conflicts at this Finnish estate followed, and the Niskavuori series became a national emblem with many stage productions, films and later televised versions. The Niskavuori history is excellently described, analysed and problematized by film scholar Anu Koivunen in her monograph Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions.Footnote ³⁰ The play from 1936 was, due to its rapid international success, also offered to the German theatre, but had to pass through the censorship of the Reichskulturkammer. While it was first considered to be unsuitable for the new Germany, one of the censors changed his mind and Die Frauen auf Niskavuori was actually staged in Hamburg in 1938. After only twelve performances the production was stopped, mainly because of the protests of Finns living in Germany: Hella Wuolijoki was a well-know leftist in Finland. During the next few years, repeated attempts were made to convince German censors that this was a genuine play for the German stage, but no further productions were allowed.

Hana Worthen has made these negotiations between Finland and Nazi Germany the theme of her dissertation, Playing ‘Nordic’: The Women of Niskavuori, Agri/Culture, and Imagining Finland on the Third Reich Stage.Footnote ³¹ Can one claim that this play represents the German ideas of Blut und Boden? Why were certain Finnish circles so interested in having it staged in Germany? These and many other questions are thoroughly discussed in Worthen's work, which contributes to illuminating the difficult and contradictory stances taken before and during the Second World War. Similar problems, although from a different perspective, were discussed in Hanna Korsberg's dissertation on the relationship between the Finnish National Theatre and Nazi Germany, the latter mainly represented by the Schiller Theater in Berlin and its leader, Heinrich George. The Schiller Theater had the status of a national stage during the Nazi era, and had presented a guest performance at the Finnish National Theatre during their Nordic tour in 1939 (when they also performed in Stockholm). Now George expected the Finns to come as guests to Berlin and a number of the board members of the National Theatre were eager to meet to the expectations of the Germans. Such a guest performance never took place, but after the war the position of the board members was still a delicate issue. Korsberg analyses the circumstances of these negotiations, which included a second visit of Heinrich George in Helsinki, when he even promised to produce The Women of Niskavuori in Berlin, a promise that the German minister of culture, Josef Goebbels, quickly made him regret. Korsberg also surveys the historical accounts that were fabricated after 1945 in order to whitewash the board of the National Theatre. At this point, some sixty years later, these are still controversial issues and theatre history has become part of a national history.Footnote ³²

The same could be said about Hans Jalling's Swedish book called (in translation) To bow or not to bow?, investigating similar circumstances at the Swedish National Theatre, Dramaten. Heinrich George's Schiller Theater had visited Stockholm on the same tour as Helsinki, and Swedish theatre critics were upset to see the German flags with the swastika fly outside the National Theatre. But the Swedish National Theatre actually accepted the German invitation and performed Strindberg's play Gustav Wasa in Berlin in June 1940. Was this guest performance ordered by the Swedish foreign ministry or was it that the board or even the managing director of the theatre were willing to travel to a country that had started a war? Who was to blame for this prestigious propaganda achievement of the Nazis? Many accusations have circulated over the years, so Jalling went to the archives of the foreign ministry, to the minutes of the board meetings and also to private diaries that he managed to find. At least one point was clarified through his work: the managing director of Dramaten, the actress and well-known comedienne Pauline Brunius, the first woman ever to hold this post, strongly opposed the visit to Berlin, but she was sidestepped by the board. The chairman of the board, in turn, conformed to the wish of the foreign ministry and its policy of good relations with the big neighbour to the south. Another example of theatre as part of foreign policy.

National theatre histories

The writing and rewriting of national theatre histories is certainly a delicate issue for theatre historians. In 2004, Steve Wilmer from the School of Drama at Trinity College in Dublin edited a volume in which thirteen scholars discuss these problems.Footnote ³³ When does a national theatre history begin, what is ‘national’, what is included and what is marginalized, and who has the power to decide? Since the early 1990s these questions have also been addressed in the Nordic countries, and the responses have varied depending on the different milieux that the national scholarly communities constituted. In Denmark, a group of experienced theatre historians under the leadership of Kela Kvam from Copenhagen University managed to agree on the division of labour and chapters and edited a two-volume account of Danish theatre history from prehistoric traces to the latest trends of performance art. Of special value are the illustrations, for which a specialized editor, professor Bent Holm, was responsible. This was already in the early 1990s. At around the same time, a Norwegian academic and artist, Lise Lyche, undertook the task of presenting a national theatre history (1991). In a similar way, Jaak Rähesoo wrote a richly illustrated history, Estonian Theatre, supported by the Estonian Theatre Union.Footnote ³⁴ During the same period, professor of theatre studies Pirkko Koski at Helsinki University launched a series of Ph.D. projects in order to collect the necessary material for an extensive presentation of a Finnish national theatre history. Prior to this initiative, she had written a brochure in English to inform an international readership about the main issues of Finnish theatre. In addition, Koski and S. E. Wilmer have edited three volumes of Finnish dramas in English.Footnote ³⁵ In Sweden, the National Research Council refused to support a similar project, although numerous prominent theatre scholars were involved. Again and again, applications with different strategies were rejected. After the turn of the millennium, two different approaches to the writing of a national theatre history opposed each other. Now the Research Council became interested and the project turned into an affair of research politics, which may be worth a brief account, as it illustrates the question posed above: who is empowered to write a national theatre history?

In the spring of 2001, two applications for national theatre history projects were sent to the Research Council. One was signed by a group of scholars from the Department of Theatre Studies at Stockholm University (led by myself); the other was compiled by a group of senior professors in literary studies from various universities in Sweden. The latter group was encouraged to do so by a member of the Research Council's own evaluation group. There were considerable differences between these applications. The Stockholm group shared the belief that theatre history consists of theatrical events embedded in specific cultural contexts that have to be accounted for, while a unified, straight chronology of periods and people is neither interesting nor possible. The suggestion, therefore, was to split theatre history into three parts: a thin volume that contained an overview of theatrical events from the Bronze Age to television, a second volume of specialized articles on particular problem areas, and a third volume presenting pertinent source materials of Swedish theatre. The literature professors proposed a traditional chronological rendering of historical epochs in three or four volumes. Of course, the Research Council was puzzled and tried to achieve a compromise. Negotiations between the groups were not very successful and, to cut a long story short, the traditionalists were awarded €1,000,000, whereupon they excluded the theatre scholars from Stockholm altogether from the project.

Meanwhile, the former director of the National Dramatic Theatre, Lars Löfgren, had launched a series of radio programmes about Swedish theatre history, which he published in a richly illustrated volume of five hundred pages in 2003. Although not a scholarly product sensu strictu, this book appealed to a wide readership and certainly satisfied the demand for an accessible, well-written history of Swedish theatre, including Swedish performances in other countries such as Finland and America. Furthermore, the author was a well-known personality of the Swedish cultural establishment and thus respected for the rather personal views that he offered in his book.

At this time, the Stockholm group – except one member who chose to join the group that the Research Council had supported – had already decided to write their own history of Theatre in Sweden, as the title would read in English. It deals with theatre in Sweden, although its origins are not always genuinely Swedish. This volume consists of twenty chapters on issues that the Stockholm group considered important for understanding theatrical events and enterprises in Sweden. The introduction of the book, which was published in 2004, declares,

These guidelines resulted in a book that relates the history of theatre in Sweden to perspectives such as the discontinuity of historical periods, art and entertainment, men performing as women and women embodying men, national exoticism, Strindberg and his actors, children and childhood onstage and in the auditorium, feminism, ethnicity, politics and expanding areas such as dance and television shows. Lena Hammergren, Karin Helander, Tiina Rosenberg and I were using our special areas of competence to compile a volume of no more than 275 pages to give students access to a coherent yet unsimplified account of historical problems concerning the Swedish theatre. According to reviews, these objectives have been appreciated also by readers outside the academic field.

The New Swedish Theatre History, as the well-financed team of literary scholars chose to call (in translation) their three-volume opus, appeared in 2007. The title alludes to a Swedish theatre history that was published in 1917–18 by the theatre critic Georg Nordensvan, which the editor-in-chief of this new history sees as the only predecessor in the field of historiographic scholarship in Sweden. I refrain from reviewing the 1,304 pages of these volumes here, but others have presented their views. Mikko-Olavi Seppälä, in an extensive evaluation, has arrived at the conclusion that these scholars have learned a lot from Lars Löfgren and the Stockholm group, but that their new Swedish theatre history promises too much in terms of a systematic overview – it accumulates more or less well-known features in the traditional way of (hi-)story telling.Footnote ³⁶ If the responsible editors of each volume are to be blamed for that it is beyond the scope of this article.

From a pedagogical point of view this situation is enthralling: there are three independent accounts of Sweden's national theatre history, which provide excellent material for comparative historiographic analyses. Students and colleagues will have a chance to study how various periods, genres, personalities and professions have been presented, discussed, canonized and marginalized, how contexts have been written in and out of history, and what quantity means in relation to quality. In the end, everybody should be grateful for this variety of historical accounts, no matter how these books were created and financed and which one of them ‘best’ represents Swedish national identity.

Concluding remarks

When I look back at the sections of this presentation, I feel quite optimistic about the future of theatre studies in the Nordic countries. Much has happened during the last decade and much is happening today. An important connection to the international community of theatre researchers has been established through many international conferences. Among them I would like to mention the IFTR/FIRT world congresses in Stockholm (1989) and Helsinki (2006) and the conference of Performance Studies International in Copenhagen (2008). For eleven years (ending in 2006) Pirkko Koski gathered scholars and students in an international summer school in the Finnish countryside. These and other conferences and symposia have stimulated Nordic researchers to expand their field of studies. There are especially two areas where I see a steady extension into new domains, namely an interdisciplinary widening of theatre studies and a fresh curiosity towards theatre history. When I speak of interdisciplinary approaches, I mean theatre scholars who are interested in phenomena that traditionally were not seen as objects of theatre research. This opening of the field comes close to what in America is called performance studies (PS), but so far only one Nordic department of theatre studies, in Copenhagen, will add PS to its name. It is partly that there is no Scandinavian word equivalent to what is meant by ‘performance’, partly that the European tradition has always included a broad range of performative activities under the label of ‘theatre’. In that sense theatre and dance are understood as inclusive terms. I have, for instance, already mentioned Dirk Gindt's dissertation on men and masculinity in political demonstrations, and more projects of this kind are under way. The solemn opening of parliament as well as the legal proceedings in a courtroom would be other examples. Art installations, commercial ‘events’, ceremonies at sports events, and military exercises could be added. Common to these research projects is the approach of the researchers who analyse such events from a theatrical point of view, without considering the events as theatre as such. It is not a question of turning the parliament, a courtroom, a parade and so on into a theatre, nor is the image of theatre used in a metaphorical sense. Rather, theatre theory and analytical methods are ‘borrowed’ from theatre studies and applied to events of these kinds. The results are encouraging: the performative aspects, the dramaturgical structure, the function of the audience, the signification of dress codes and environmental arrangements permit the researcher to understand these happenings in ways that traditional descriptions could not capture. Theatre studies are used to saying something about life in society.

There is a great need to revive the theoretical approaches to past theatrical events. Instead of simply collecting more facts with an accumulative attitude to history, it is necessary to understand history as problems and questions. The shift in historiographical theory that postmodernism had triggered has served as a catalyst for questioning the possibilities of historical research altogether. One does not need to agree fully with the radical theoretical ideas of, for instance, Keith Jenkins or Alun Munslow, forcefully rejecting traditional history writing, including the cause-and-effect explanations, the master narratives that are repeated and canonized, the sources that speak for themselves, but their strong positions have caused a fresh and invigorating discussion about history as a discipline. Of course, theatre history, too, has profited from these questions about time and place, identity and narration.Footnote ³⁷ These approaches are also reflected in doctoral research projects on the theatricalization of eighteenth-century court life, on the theatricality of military exhibitionism as well as the military as stage figure, on the performative aspects of abstract dance movies, on the social impact of revue dancing, and so on. I am convinced that theatre history is on the brink of a far-reaching revitalization.

A new generation of researchers will bring about changes that we cannot envision today. When I was a student myself, the analysis of contemporary performances was simply not thought of. Of course we went to the theatre and talked about our experiences, but that was not part of our academic discourse. To study theatre in a ‘scientific’ way meant collecting ‘facts’ about theatre history. Today, performance analysis is a regular feature in the curricula of most theatre departments. There are different theories and methods, but the question of whether it is possible to analyse a performance that we have seen ourselves is no longer asked. Even the theoretical understanding of theatre has changed. Theatre was formerly spoken of as a ‘work of art’ and a production was the result of a director's artistic ambitions. I have lived through a long period during which semiotics was considered the only serious theory that could be applied to theatre as art form. Today, hardly anybody speaks of indexical signs or the semiosis of a set design. Ideas such as an aesthetic of the performative or the eventness of theatrical encounters have replaced the ‘work of art’. I am quite optimistic when I speculate about the future of theatre studies in the Nordic countries – it seems to be a healthy and expansive discipline that will attract the best young people.