Who can compete with Shakespeare in our times of crisis?

This is a comment text. The author is responsible for the analysis and positioning in the text.

It’s spring for Will. Both on a local level and on a more universal level. The latter shows that Shakespeare specialists are once again discussing whether it would be possible to “fix” the world with Shakespeare’s help. “The Reperative Shakespeare,” as a yearbook is called. At the same time, the Shakespeare Factory in Vadstena plans to “Shakespeareize” Swedish drama. The summer workshop is therefore aimed at both young and established playwrights who want to “explore the larger formats” under the leadership of Pontus Plaenges and Christina Gottfridsson.

I don’t know who or what could compete with Shakespeare in times of dramatic crisis of the kind we are living through now. The Bible? With some hesitation. None other than Harold Bloom declared that it was Shakespeare who invented man. Romeo and Juliet, not Adam and Eve.

The spring repertoire scores points in the same direction. “Macbeth” at the Uppsala City Theater, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Teater Västernorrland and no less than three “Romeo and Juliet”. There is also Peter Oskarson’s “Stormen” in the Orionteatern as well as Mattias Andersson and Dramaten’s “Hamlet” success, which will move from Elverket to Nybroplan after the summer.

Even the sonnets have been given a choreographic form in the Gothenburg City Theater, while the tireless Shakespeare translator Ulf Peter Hallberg (DN, 4/1) believes that he sees heaven and earth in the dramaturgy: “In the form that it has in language, it comes close to something divine, namely that we can understand ourselves. And in a certain way that gives us the opportunity to process even harsh conditions like today.”

What kind of man did he invent? Inexhaustible. Anything is possible, for example Macbeth, the Scottish king, turning from a fairly decent point into a murderer overnight. Not to mention Puck, the cheeky master of ceremonies in Midsummer Forest:

Sometimes I become a horse with a green tail.

A sow, a dog, a bear, a fiery red glow.

I growl, grunt, bark, roar, burn.

I lure you away from the world you know.

Everyone finds their place in Shakespeare’s plays. Peter Brook with his sexy “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Giorgio Strehler with his deeply human “King Lear”. Ours and Dramaten’s Alf Sjöberg, who in the mid-1950s mapped the subterranean connection between Shakespeare and The Queen’s Jewel, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s transgressive “romance.”

Ingmar Bergman is like usually a special case. He begins early with three productions of Macbeth, the first at Mäster Olofsgården in 1940, the third at the Gothenburg City Theater seven years later. Then a 27-year break, probably due to fear of contact. Although “Trettondagsafton” – an actors’ party on the big drama stage in 1975 – gave some hope to the doubters, the tragic big bets “King Lear” and “Hamlet” showed that William and Ingmar were not made for each other.

You can’t fool Shakespeare with psychology. Ingmar Bergman’s alter ego was not William, but Henrik Ibsen.

“I am not who I am,” says Viola in “Trottondagsafton.” Bergman could never have said that.