Fanny and Alexander is a story that many people already have a strong emotional connection to. Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece is challenging to interpret, but the audience at the premiere was visibly impressed. Including myself.
The large stage of the Helsinki City Theatre is indeed large, and it can be seen in Fanny and Alexander, where the sets rotate in the middle of enormous darkness. At the beginning, Fanny and Alexander climb into the audience and admire the stage with a child’s enthusiasm. Then the play literally explodes into life in the middle of the Christmas party.
The play is a family drama of epic proportions, and its author, Ingmar Bergman, has also dealt with his own experiences through it. Director Paavo Westerberg has taken that story nicely and continued to narrate the processing of traumas and in general raise the importance of stories to the central place of the play. Each character lives in a different story, producing them and reproducing them in their actions. Children in particular experience the world strongly, both externally and internally.
There are certainly as many interpretations of the play as there are spectators, but Westerberg himself highlights the story of his childhood and how we will face that story again later:
“However, one key could be how our childhood appears when we look back on it. What are the highlights there? How we write the script of our childhood from a new perspective every day, emphasizing what is important to us at that particular moment and what serves us. Let it be our freedom.”