After the Rehearsal/Persona, Barbican, London, review: Ivo van Hove's fascinating double bill of Bergman

Toneelgroep Amsterdam artfully pair two Bergman screenplays about the phoniness of the theatre

(Jan Versweyveld)

He has already mounted theatrical versions of Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage. Now, rounding off their residency at the Barbican, Ivo van Hove and his Toneelgroep Amsterdam continue their exploration of Ingmar Bergman with this fascinating double bill of two more screenplays by the Swedish maestro, re-imagined for the stage.

The pieces are artfully paired. After the Rehearsal, a made-for-TV movie from 1984, focuses on Hendrik Vogler, an obsessive, ageing theatre director and the two actors – his washed-up ex-lover Rachel, and Anna, her daughter and his current budding star – who, seeking validation from him, hurl themselves against his obdurate need for complete control. In Bergman’s 1966 classic Persona, Elisabeth Vogler, a renowned actress, falls mute during a performance of Electra and withdraws into silence. When Alma, her young nurse, accompanies her on a summer retreat to a deserted island and tries to kindle a response, tensions between the women start to rise and personalities eerily to merge.

The pieces are bound together by an anxiety that, theatricality, is unsalvageably mired in phoniness. “A director must know when to listen and when to shut up,” declares Hendrik (Gijs Scholten van Aschat), who is rarely known to stop for a breather from his intense guttural hectoring. This figure literally lives in the sanctum of the stage amid a clutter of former props, and rejoices in his furnishing’s gimcrack lineage: “Everything only represents something, nothing is.” Meanwhile Elisabeth Vogler in Persona is, perhaps, the extreme antithesis of Hendrik, paranoically fastidious about the risk of falsity.

Van Hove uses the same trio of actors in each of the productions. So here we’ve already seen the excellent Marieke Heebink as the abjectly chaotic Rachel in After the Rehearsal, desperate to be reassured that her reputation as a drunk won’t continue to cost her leading roles, before we encounter her next – naked and on a gurney – as the enigmatic refusenik, Elisabeth. It’s one of the many ways in which these productions bounce suggestively off each other.

The greater age-distance between patient and nurse makes more sense of the psychology in this account of Persona and Gaite Jansen’s Alma sometimes radiates a desperate insecurity. She’s also spellbinding in the long speech about the life-changing orgy on the beach with two teenage youths. The grey walls of Jan Versweyveld’s set collapse, to expose a wooden deck surrounded by gallons of shimmering water. There’s a wind machine and the women, in their swimsuits, are soon almost knocked over by drenching gusts. The sequence is spectacular all right, and the designer later bathes the white backdrop in lovely shades of soft apricot and lavender-grey.

But unlike the imagery in the film – the unforgettably creepy superimposition of faces, say, or the shots of the excluded boy who could be Elisabeth’s rejected son or Alma’s aborted baby – the brief storm doesn’t take you far into the disturbing id of this story. The exception is the wateriness of one very fine sequence where Elisabeth’s husband enters through a surreal central door and mistakes the nurse for his wife as he sloshes forward in his suit and shoes.

However, the relationship in Persona is intricately cross-hatched by Heebink and Jansen, and the production of After the Rehearsal beautifully handles the collapse of time that has the younger actress unwittingly sharing the stage with her mother. Double-bill recommended.

‘After the Rehearsal’ and ‘Persona’ played at the Barbican up to 30 September, barbican.org.uk