Nordisk teater i Montevideo Kontextrelaterad reception av Henrik Ibsen och August Strindberg

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to study the dialogue between the Scandinavian drama and the Uruguayan theatre; how drama from Scandinavia has been received in the Río de la Plata during the last hundred years; how it has been adapted and activated to be meaningful to the audience; how it has been integrated within the Uruguayan theatre and society and how the play changes with that new dialogue. As this is the first study of Scandinavian plays in Uruguay a secondary purpose is to document what has been put on stage; fifty-three productions, ninety percent of which were plays by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. The study is organized in three parts: a) a historical and sociological description of the Uruguayan society and its theatre; b) a presentation of Scandinavian drama, staging of Scandinavian theatre and its reception during the twentieth century; c) a comparative analysis of the reception in its widest sense at different periods of eleven productions of two dramas by Ibsen and one by Strindberg. The work is thus part of a tradition of the history of reception. According to the hermeneutic method, the reading is done from the horizon of expectation at the time of the staging interwined with today’s perspective. I follow the Argentinean investigator of theatre Osvaldo Pellettieri’s definition of the concept “reception”: passive reception by the public; reproductive reception , reception including translation and criticism; productive reception , creative reception expressed as staging or as a text that is evidently influenced by another text. In studying the process from the source text of a play to the reception of a performance, the four steps that Patrice Pavis has pointed out have been followed: 1) the interidiomatic translation of the text, 2) the translation of the text into a manuscript as base for a production 3) the staging and 4) the performance as received by the public. More emphasis is put on the linguistic aspect of the reception and reconstruction than is generally the case in theatre research, as this study lies on the border between literature and theatre studies. Do the Scandinavian plays fall into the topics of the day, politically, socially, culturally and aesthetically? Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s dramatic production have drawn the attention of Uruguayan critics since 1894, four years before the public had the opportunity to see a play on stage in Montevideo. Their contents and dramatic aesthetics were evaluated and we