Thrill seekers

Through a Glass Darkly
Almeida, until 31 July

After the Dance
Lyttelton, in rep until 11 August

Ingmar Bergman wrote his first film aged 24. It was called Torment and he continued to entertain audiences in similar vein for the rest of his career. That an artist is easy to satirise is no proof of inadequacy, of course. MC Hammer was easy to laugh at too, and look how brilliant he was. But Bergman is the most austere and humourless of dramatists. He was so dry the ink wouldn’t flow from his pen but spilled out in dusty granules.

Through a Glass Darkly, the only one of his films he permitted to be adapted for the stage, comes from the starchier end of the spectrum. It’s August. We’re on a remote archipelago where a family of high-minded Swedes are having a holiday from hell. Karin is recovering from a nervous collapse. Her father, a novelist, is planning a book tour of Yugoslavia, the only country in Europe that fully appreciates his work. His loquacious 16-year-old son is bursting at the seams to become a playwright and knocks out a new script every afternoon. But will dad read his work? Nope. The old sourboots deliberately ignores the hint-hint manuscripts which are placed every morning on the breakfast table beside the cold tea, burnt toast, stale cornflakes and rotten eggs. (I’m assuming, rather than reporting, that the breakfast ingredients are inedible but their putrescence would harmonise with Bergman’s world-view.)

Karin, meanwhile, is going more and more bonkers, just like her mother who, we are encouraged to deduce, killed herself. Her father confesses to his diary that his daughter’s breakdown will furnish excellent material for his next potboiler. When Karin reads this admission the consequences are, shall we say, some distance from being hilarious.