BJÖRN’S THOUGHTS

The play Night Rider premiered in February 2008 at Gothenburg Municipal Theater, on their New Studio stage. The four roles were played by Nina Zanjani, Magnus Krepper, Lisa Lindgren and Anna Bjelkerud.

 I remember the work as particularly burdensome as my transformation from playwright to director during the actual rehearsal period did not take run completely smoothly.

Half of the ensemble went on a tour abroad over the Christmas holidays, to Tanzania and Zanzibar. One of the actors came home from the south with an amoeba that she did not get rid of. So, not only was the change from author to director in me increasingly painful, moreover, one of the actors periodically attempted to "skip" the production since, as she put it, the amoeba had taken over her. In the end, medical science remedied her bacterial flora and the final lap before the premiere could be completed without disturbing interruptions.

The actors' efforts and courage were invaluable as there is always a lot of uncertainty about a newly written text. For me as an author, the play was a strange and enigmatic creation with a finale that I still remember with physical tangibility. To the thrills and joys of this production included the rewarding collaboration with set designer Peter Lundquist, who taught me a lot about the theatre's possibilities. At times we were in an almost symbiotic relationship. He was the one who envisioned the doll in the stand, and the solution with the bathtub in the finale (accompanied by Gavin Bryar's Jesus blood never failed with yet).

However, somewhere during the rehearsals, I had been intimidated by what the play was actually about: a strange portrayal of a middle-aged man in a life crisis (at a time when the transformation from peace to the perennial wars on terrorism was deepening).

Having recently revised the text, I am amazed at its integrity. I have allowed myself some small alterations, reinforcements, deletions, clarifications, simplifications. As always, it is difficult to put out all the exclamation marks and question marks and punctuation marks correctly. When the rehearsal version was handed out at the theater, all question marks and exclamation marks were missing. Stelllan Skarsgård once advised me, after reading a script, to remove the question marks and exclamation marks as an actor tends to play these characters without considering the dialogue's possibilities for division.

When my review of the text was finished, I had a strong desire to stage the play again (but I will never do that). For the text exposed a wide range of possibilities; lots of opportunities, as I see it. And it is more relevant now than at the time. Because back then we went through the Iraq war and began to suspect that the conflict in the Middle East possessed all the characteristics of becoming a so-called "perfect storm" in a not too distant future.

The reception of the play was very mixed, which probably depends more on the director's work than the author's. In a way, it is a ballet about intimate relationships, written to be performed on a tightrope, without safety nets.

After the premiere, I thought badly about this play for many years and I have not since directed drama of my own writing. But re-reading the play after so many years, in a sense rehabilitated the text, which I felt redeeming, I am happy to say.

However, I would never be able to write a play like this one today.