DOPO LA PROVA

In suspended time, in the half-light of an old stage, Henrik Vogler, a great director and theater director, is sitting in an armchair, motionless. He appears almost stuffed. He is 109 years old or perhaps only 62. The stage is cluttered with stage equipment, wings, props, left over from an afternoon rehearsal of Strindberg's The Dream. Now, however, the director is left alone. The building is completely deserted. The curtain is up until to halfway through. Suddenly Anna Egerman, a young actress playing Indra's Daughter in the play directed from Vogler, appears on the scene. from this moment begins a close confrontation between the two who, suspended in a border zone, finally allow themselves to speak the truth. It is almost a ray of light in a dark room from years, a moment of reality in an existence of fiction. The sudden entrance of Rakel, introduces other Bergmanian themes of extraordinary poignancy: the perception of time, the fear of old age, the extraordinary fragility of the female soul. Rakel's is a figure who walks a tightrope, an artist destroyed by her own talent, a flayed alive. In After the Rehearsal Bergman does not even create "characters" anymore, but languages, emotional functions, "containers" of frailties, anxieties and fears, real women and men who can no longer to live with the lies, with the compromises of bourgeois life, old-children who risk their lives, lose their balance and fall to to the ground in the grip of an obsessive need for truth, for a possible meaning, for a sign, a gesture that gives meaning to their little lives. The theater in the end, will forever remain that poor island suspended on the edge of the horizon, a place more real than the real, the last refuge untouched by the complexity of daily life, the arrogance of politics, the arrogance of court intellectuals, the buying and selling of public offices, governed solely by dream and illusion, a small theater in closure, suspended in nothingness, over the abyss.