Playing with the national heritage

‘I find the Viking age a very intriguing period to deal with’, says the director.

Baltasar Kormákur is a prolific theatre and film director, and he has also appeared in films and theatre productions himself. His film credits as a director include 101 Reykjavik (2000), A Little Trip to Heaven (2005, starring Julia Stiles and Forest Whitaker), Jar City (2006), White Night Wedding (2008) and Inhale (2009). His films have won several international awards.

‘I first read Gerpla when I was in college, and the idea of bringing it to life, whether in the theatre or as a film, has been at the back of my mind for a long time. It was more tempting to rework it for the stage than for the screen, as that gave me the opportunity to make my way through the work in collaboration with an ensemble of actors. Working out an adaptation on the floor with a group of actors is a method I find very inspiring and rewarding’, says Kormákur.

Mixed with Icelandic pop songs

Throughout the performance Baltazar Kormákur addresses the character of the Icelandic nation, the national heritage – what it means to be an Icelander. He makes various references to Icelandic culture and theatre. The costumes for instance are similar to the attire used in traditional Icelandic wrestling, but at the same time they resemble the black ‘neutral’ costumes popular in 1970s experimental theatre. The music is a collection of well-known Icelandic pop songs sung in traditional style, and the set is based on familiar features of the Icelandic countryside: rock, ice and tufts of grass.

‘Yes, we are dealing with the national character and the national heritage. When we started looking at the material we realised that we had all of Icelandic history in our hands. Working on the dramatisation of a novel published in 1952, based on the 13th century Fostbrædra saga, which deals with events that supposedly took place in the late 11th century, it was inevitable that we would delve into the whole history of Iceland and its cultural heritage. At the same time we wondered how we could approach this material in theatrical terms. It didn’t feel right to use methods currently in vogue in European theatre to deal with the Icelandic cultural heritage. Instead we decided to see what would happen if we used the style and presentation of Icelandic amateur theatre’, says Kormákur. He claims that many people in Icelandic theatrical circles today are somewhat afraid of amateur theatre, mostly from their fear of doing something old fashioned and out of style.

Infuse it with new life

The actors were slightly alarmed at first when Kormákur presented the idea of tapping into this heritage.

‘We researched how Icelandic theatre has traditionally dealt with the heritage of the sagas. We looked at old pictures from various performances: amateur shows, Viking festivals and so on. We reflected on all the clichés of presenting the Viking age. Usually people have tried to recreate the world of the sagas as realistically as possible, according to the view of the Viking age current at the time. We went through all of this and emerged with what we have in our hands now. To me it is essential that we allow ourselves to play around with the cultural heritage and approach it in a creative way, both in the theatre and in other artistic fields. In that way we may be able to infuse it with new life. If we can’t tamper with the things that belong to our cultural heritage, we risk the chance of it dying. We can extend the lifespan of old things by working with them.

Conflicting feelings

When people talk of Gerpla, they often regard it primarily as a satire.

‘There’s certainly a lot of humour in it, but when I started reading Gerpla again it wasn’t the humour that engaged me most. My feeling was that Gerpla was a deeply personal work in which the author was dealing on the one hand with things and emotions in his own life and on the other hand with his relationship to the Icelandic nation itself, and of course the heritage of the sagas’, says Kormákur.

‘In Halldór Laxness’s works – both his novels and his other texts – you can sense the intense emotional relationship Laxness has with the Icelandic nation, and how he struggles with conflicting feelings of love and a certain amount of disapproval.

‘Halldór has a complicated relationship with the Icelandic sagas in much the same way. He knew them by heart, and he rebelled in a way against them as a young man, but his love for them was profound. To me, in Gerpla, Laxness is ridiculing not the Icelandic sagas but rather the image Icelanders have created of them and their heroes. And perhaps to some degree the author is making fun of himself’, says Kormákur.

Follow your own vision

Laxness endeavoured to publish the Icelandic sagas with modern spelling, and some regarded this as sacrilegious. Many were shocked when he published Gerpla.

‘Do you think some people might resent your reworking this book, so dear to many, in the way that you do?’

‘Throughout my career I have tackled various classic works and I know that sometimes members of the audience arrive with preconceived ideas of what they want to see. But in my opinion when you are working in the theatre you can’t dwell on that or try to meet the expectations of the audience. If you want to be honest in your work, you have to follow your own vision, follow the vision that evolves within you throughout the process of working. If you try to please everyone by presenting the lowest common denominator, you risk the chance of the outcome becoming impersonal, simple and dull, as so often happens with Hollywood films. Laxness in his own time played around with the Fostbrædra saga and created Gerpla as an independent work of literature. We are creating a new, independent entity, a theatre performance’.

‘Have you given any thought to Gerpla as material for a film?’

‘Yes, in fact I have. Now that I’ve done all the work associated with finding a way through to this performance, I feel up to tackling it as a film. I am currently working on another Viking film, but these two films would be completely different. They would explore a similar age but from two very different angles’.

Our perception of ourselves

As an artist he is more and more drawn towards the national heritage. ‘The ancient sagas are perhaps the greatest achievement of the Icelandic nation, and as such people tend to judge harshly any attempts at reworking or interpreting them. The debate regarding this literary heritage can become very emotionally charged, because it is so very often interwoven with both the perception individual people have of themselves and also with our perception of ourselves as a nation’.