Scenes from the Intimate Theater

By RICHARD CORLISS

AFTER THE REHEARSAL Directed and written by Ingmar Bergman

No other film maker of the first rank has devoted himself so fully to another medium as Ingmar Bergman has to the stage. Since his career began in 1944 (when his first screenplay was produced, and he was named artistic director of the Halsingborg City Theater), Bergman has spent most of his time as one of the world's premier theater directors. For him, the writing and directing of films is both a vacation from and an extension of his stage work. In films from Smiles of a Summer Night to Fanny and Alexander, Bergman has celebrated that bare stage, on which actor and director collaborate with a willing audience to make a little magic. Now he has distilled his 40 years theater experience into a "small" film--one simple set, three speaking parts, 72 minutes--that is as direct, serene and human as any he has made.

Henrik Vogler (Erland Josephson) is a renowned stage director, now embarking on a new production of August Strindberg's 1902 fantasia, A Dream Play. In the pivotal role of Indra's Daughter he has cast young Anna Egerman (Lena Olin), who is the daughter of two of Henrik's old acting colleagues. One afternoon, following a rehearsal of the play, the dozing Henrik is awakened by Anna. They sit on an old sofa and chat about their crossed lives and their shared art. The talk drifts to Anna's dead mother Rakel, and in the wink of a reverie, Rakel (Ingrid Thulin) appears to Henrik, to reprise a bitter interlude from a decade before. Rakel, past her prime as an actress, has been offered a small part in one of Henrik's earlier productions of A Dream Play. She flirts and quarrels; he tries to act sympathetic. Rakel disappears, and Henrik resumes his conversation with Anna. Is the master falling in love with his star pupil? Perhaps. Will the infatuation be consummated? Probably not. Will the show go on? Most assuredly, for Henrik is the director; the afternoon has been his dream play.

Henrik seems in control of all his dreams, the ones he puts onstage as well as those popping out of his past and present. Just the memory of Rakel can make him feel a sense of loss, as he considers her promise destroyed by drink, abuse and self-hatred. Only Anna's threat to walk out on the play can rouse him to wrath, for she is betraying not just Strindberg or her fellow actors or the audience, but the holy Henrik. Like any other man, he is susceptible to the attentions of a strong, beautiful young woman; like any other director, he can both experience an emotion and observe it from a dispassionate distance. And so Henrik and Anna talk themselves into and out of an affair, imagining and acting out the pursuit, the coquetry, the ecstasy, the jealousy, the bittersweet parting. It is the film's loveliest scene.

Strindberg has been an inspiration for Bergman ever since he first read the playwright's works as a boy of twelve. For theater, radio and television he has mounted more than a dozen Strindberg plays. Three times he has staged A Dream Play, in 1970 refining the work's surreal sprawl into a spare "chamber play" like After the

Rehearsal and turning Indra's Daughter into the dream of another character, the Poet, even as Henrik may conjure up Anna here. In 1980 Bergman was planning a fourth production of the play, but circumstances intervened. Instead, that summer, he wrote the script for After the Rehearsal. The original 1907 production of A Dream Play starred Strindberg's third wife, a young actress, as Indra's Daughter; in Bergman's 1980 revival the part was to have been played by Liv Ullmann, who had been his housemate for many years; in After the Rehearsal Henrik casts Anna, for whom he entertains a sort of paternal passion. The echoes resound through Strindberg's, Bergman's and Henrik's careers. The ghosts walk, full-bodied, onto the screen.

Rakel, the most cynical ghost, might ask: Can our interest be sustained in a film consisting of backstage gossip, musings on life and art, the airing out of old closets (skeletons included)? That is a challenge worth meeting. These days most movies sink their teeth into us; Bergman's film al lows us to reverse the trend. Here we must work for our pleasures. We must be open to the stern eloquence of Bergman's dialogue, and to the subtle visual strategies he devises to turn a one-set "play" into a full-blooded movie. But he offers us more than text and pretext. There is the wise tenderness of Josephson's performance, the star-is-born radiance of Olin, the brave desperation in Thulin's face and body. There is, above all, the rigor and vigor Bergman has brought to this theatrical testament. "Theater ought to be the encounter of human beings with human beings and nothing more," he has said.

"All else is distracting." No distractions here. And for the best film of 1984, so far, no rivals.

-- By Richard CorUss