sallysfriends.net

- a review-ish rant about the one and only theatre version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a.k.a. Men Who Hate Women, playing on Nørrebro Teater right here in Copenhagen until 29 January 2011.

by Christopher Marcus
All photos by Miklos Szabo

I went to see the play Men Who Hate Women (Mænd der hader kvinder in Danish – and, as you all know, also the original title of the first book) not really knowing what to expect. I had heard that Eva Gabrielsson had been a consultant on the play which would bode well for it being ‘in the spirit of Stieg’, I thought, but I wasn’t sure how much you could do with a story like that with a bunch of people running around on a wooden stage trying to make us believe they are deep in the Swedish woods chasing serial rapist killers. I mean, you’ve read the book – you’ve seen the movie – what the beep could theatre add to those?!

Quite a lot, it turns out.

Now, since most of you reading this are not going to be able to watch the play (yet), I want to concentrate on its treatment of the basic story of Men Who Hate Women (Tattoo) and discuss how well it gets away with the ‘conversion’. So strap yourselves in and join me on the ride. So I’m not going to rant at length about the actors or anything like that. It’s the story that counts – and how do you make it count – how do you make it work on stage?!

(I also assume that you know the story by heart, so if you don’t want spoilers or if you are still confused by the Vanger family tree (yeah, me too) then you have been warned!)

To play or not to play

First: Theatre can do a lot that movies can’t (unless the director really wants them to). In particular the emotional expression is experienced by the audience as more naked and resonant, because they are real people in the same room. (Or at least so it should be – if the actors know their stuff.)

So it is with MDHK, too. Barring options for showing high speed car chases and mist-dripping vistas of the mysterious Swedish forests, it wisely the focuses on the characters, or, more exactly, on the message that lies underneath the character drama: That there are men who hate women – yes – BUT it is just as big a problem, too, that women don’t believe in their own worth sufficiently to break away from those men or seek justice afterwards. Generally speaking that is. (And with Salander as the obvious exception as regards the justice-seeking part.)

A few times it annoyed me a bit that this point was explained either by the characters or the grown up Harriet – who functions as a kind of meta-narrator, popping up now and then at the edge of the stage to tell us how it feels to be abused as a woman. Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound so cool but the actress is very good and helps us visualise the experiences that she (Harriet) has endured by mixing narration of events, jumbled emotional expressions and downright excuses for not wanting to deal with this problem and pretensions of normalcy and inner struggles about whether or not she should do so anyway. And in the end, of course, we find out that she is of course the estranged, adult Harriet Vanger, who has sought refugee from both her family and her memories of that family and her responsibility for facing the past – for almost 4 decades hiding in the Australian bush and elsewhere, trying to re-enact some kind of ‘normal life’.

Read head Sally

Signe Engholm’s Salander is also really good and they kept her hair fiery red (her natural colour), although I think they actually dyed it to be even more red than her original colour of the actress! In the beginning I wondered why, since Sally has black hair in the book and movie, but it actually made her stand out more from the other actors I think, and it is also a nice little nod (‘a socalled Easter Egg) if you will to those fans who remember how much Salander was based on Pippi Longstocking.

Signe does a great job of playing Salander but she is much more vocal and emotional with her voice than the Salander of the book or of the movie. In the beginning I thought this was weird and unnatural and I still can’t quite get to ‘grips’ with her version of Salander, not completely anyhow. But come to think of it, I doubt she had many other choices. You can’t zoom in on Salander’s face on a stage. You can’t show her thoughts narrated in text. You have the voice and the body to work with as an actor/actress so naturally that’s what you emphasise. And she does, as I already said, a great job of showing the neurotic-ness of Lisbeth all the way through.

Ego-idealistic Kalle?

Jens Jørgen Spottag’s Blomkvist is both very clever, lovable, naive and selfish at the same time. Not much to say about his performance actually; he is a veteran Danish actor and pulled off a quite solid, if not sparkling, performance. But I think you have to remember also that the Blomkvist of the book is not a particularly well-rounded character.

Of course we hear a lot about his emotions about events that happen to him – such as the Wennerström trial – and about his idealism – and his feeling for Lisbeth. But the real human being Mikael Blomkvist, the real person with a childhood for example and some influential family figures and some traumas as well as successful experiences to draw strength from, we actually don’t see that much of him, if he ever existed, in Larsson’s books.

Blomkvist is to a large extent, like Salander, ‘Kalle Blomkvist 2.0’ – a grown up version of Kalle Blomkvist, both a loving homage and pastiche of a relatively two-dimensional boy detective from the 50’s or 60’s, infused with some of Larsson’s own experiences as a journalist, his antipathies and antipathies vis-a-vis women, men, capitalists, Nazis and so on. In that regard the play actually makes more of Blomkvist as a real person, e.g. as a father to his daughter Pernilla, by giving her a more prominent role and letting her comment on his constant absentmindedness when he is ‘immersed’ in a case of research.

Unlike the book’s ending it is not really clear whether or not Blomkvist, when everything’s back to normal, is just a relatively egotistic journalist, although idealistic enough when it comes to exposing industrialist bad guys, or whether or not it is all in Salander’s mind – that he doesn’t really care for her, or feel any lasting gratitude (he rushes of to party with the Millennium staff) just after she has handed him all the evidence he needs to bag Wennerström.

Likewise the scene where Blomkvist parts to party with Erika and Lisbeth mopes, is just added as a very small, but still quite forceful conclusion to the whole story: Yes, Blomkvist is nicer than all the other guys Salander has met but in the end he really only thinks of himself and the people who are like him, like Erika, and want to be with them. Or so Salander interprets it.

To the heart of the matter

The end, where Blomkvist faces Harriet and reveals her true identity to the audience – and the following scenes where she in turn confronts Henrik and the rest of the family are actually quite revealing of both the strengths and the weaknesses of a stage play. They are over with quite quickly, because – again – there is no time for all the complex relation untanglements.

They are also done with, obviously, because they are anti-climatic – just after the showdown with Martin Vanger in the basement and after the mystery of Harriet’s disappearance has been cleared up. But it makes for a nice ‘emotional wrap-up’ that the reunion scenes with broken old Henrik, as well as the display of scorn and denial of Harriet by the rest of the family, are not drawn out needlessly and melodramatically. I did need some relatively quick closure as a spectator after the powerful rape-scenes and monologues about the same (like the younger Harriet’s moving retelling to the audience about the day in Gottfried’s cabin when he tried to rape her again and she subsequently hit him with an ore and drowned him, only to be assaulted by her brother, Martin, afterwards).

As a matter of fact the play nicely expands upon Larsson’s conception of Blomkvist as the ‘woman’ in the relationship and Salander as ‘the man’. For example, Martin Vanger actually gets to start the rape scene of Blomkvist (with a nightstick or something – that was never quite clear to me – and of course, it was all done away from the eyes of the audience) – before Salander saves him. Afterwards Blomkvist falls apart, very much like the stereotypical woman victim after a rape scene, and berates himself for being stupid enough to trust Martin – almost to the end. It is actually a very nice way of tying together the themes about men who hate women (and women who hate themselves) with a more universal theme of abusers and abused. Like Martin says, just before he assaults Blomkvist: ‘I’ve actually never thought about why I didn’t just do this with a man before… ‘ Or something to that effect.

Eva Gabrielsson’s ‘consulting’ is probably responsible for this enhancing and highlighting of the major theme in the book(s). She, after all, knew the story better than anyone, and the emotions in her partner that moved him to write it. In any case, it works fine and is one of the highlights of the play as a whole – one of the really good parts of this reinterpretation, for that is what it is and always will be, of the source material – the book.

Compared to the movie,  I felt that the first movie adaptation – despite its near-perfect moodiness and beautiful cinematography and brilliant performance by Noomi Rapace et al. – lacked a focus on the men who hate women, and – especially – on the psychology of the women victims themselves.

Apropos: Blomkvist’s affair with Cecilia Vanger is also cut from the movie, or very much toned down if you will - but the play nicely rectifies this:

Cecilia becomes the character in the present who shows us a ‘normal’ woman (not disappeared, ghost-like like Harriet or extreme, almost charicature-like, as Salander) – but someone we can identify with who was abused. For example, a very strong scene is the one when Cecilia has to explain to Blomkvist why she hasn’t rebelled (or rather: fails to explain it properly to him).

Even Oplev’s movie adaptation, despite its qualities, is more concerned with showing us Salander’s coolness and treating the whole abuse story as a simple murder-mystery, whereas the play goes right to the heart of that story and makes us actually get a sense of nausea by giving us a chance to identify with the women who are hurt, embodied most forcefully in Cecilia but also in Harriet at the end of the play.

Salander’s feelings, however, are not cut out of the equation! They are just shown indirectly in the play – for example: how she uses sex (paradoxically) to communicate her affection for Blomkvist, even though Bjurman has just hurt her with sex as well and then later ‘collapses’ physically (slumps, isolates herself in a corner of the stage) when it becomes clear to her that she can’t ever be with Blomkvist and be ‘normal’.

And, of course, her particular role in the play is also more than clear: She is the avenging angel – unlike Cecilia and Harriet and all the other women, she acts to mete out her own brand of justice to the men who hate women and she has the capability to do so.

“Nobody’s innocent…”

I would perhaps have liked this particular aspect of the theme to have been highlighted a bit more: What to do with the men who hate women? Are we to see them as ‘sick bastards’ who just deserve what’s coming to them (and hence: Salander’s kind of justice) or are we to try to understand them as wounded human beings as Blomkvist, almost too sympathetically tries to expound a few scenes after Martin almost killed him – ?

The punishment-responsibility question is brought up, though, but it is toned down to give more room to getting across the experiences of the abused women and some semblance of explanation as to how the abuse affects them and why they just can’t ‘stop it’ once it has started, at least not after a very long time has passed. So it is a minor complaint and perhaps I will think differently if I see the play again.

Bjurman’s character, not suprisingly, is also shown without any redeeming qualities at all – like Martin Vanger. One of Larsson’s two main ‘weaknesses’ as a writer, I’d argue – he sees the world in journalistic shades of grey, until a certain point (like the possibility that a capitalist like Henrik Vanger can ‘be good’). And then he goes completely black and white. The other main weakness is his strange uninterest in showing that good sexual relationships can, in fact, include long-term romantic feelings – not just casual sex all over the plays (however deeply the characters might feel about each other in other respects, like Mimmi and Sally – or Micke and Erika). But I digress.

Final verdict

Overall the play functions very harmonically as a ‘cover-version’, if you will, of Men Who Hate Women; it draws out the best in the book, which, unlike what many people seem to express, never was really Salander’s ability to smash people with a golf-club or high speed motorcycle chases or sex after every other encounter.

As I’ve ranted about at length elsewhere – in the movie-reviews – those elements (which you can’t show in a play!) are obviously important and without them the books would never have appealed to quite so many people, that much isn’t a sin to admit. It appeals to me as well that it’s part of the mix, absolutely!

But the real heart of Stieg Larsson’s books, his core message, that’s what you get in this play and as such it is a success: There are so many men out there who ‘hate women’ – and so many women  who let them!

And that’s what it’s all about.

I do hope that the play will be set up on more stages than just here in Copenhagen. If you live nearby – go see it!

Now.

- Chris

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All photos by Mikos Szabo. Movies and photos with kind permission from Nørrebro Teater.

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THE BARE FACTS

Mænd der hader kvinder (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) – theatre version
Nørrebro Theatre, Copenhage, Denmark

Director: Kim Bjarke

Starring: Signe Egholm Olsen as Lisbeth Salander * Jens Jørn Spottag as Mikael Blomkvist

Also starring: Ulla Henningsen, Ann Eleonora Jørgensen, Max Hansen, Tom Jensen, Benedikte Hansen, Nis Bank-Mikkelsen, Sarah Boberg, Claus Bue, Jesper Hyldegaard, Lars Lunøe, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard og Anne Reumert.

Consultant: Eva Gabrielsson

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BONUS FEATURE FOR ALL YOU SALLY FRIENDS:

Watch part two and three of this interview on Nørrebro Teater’s own YouTube channel!