Theater Review: Scenes From a Marriage

You can’t accuse the Belgian director Ivo van Hove of picking fights with weaklings. His productions of Hedda Gabler, The Little Foxes, and A Streetcar Named Desire, all at New York Theater Workshop, have sometimes sucker-punched those venerable plays but in the end did no harm. I realize that’s not a high bar to set, but I have not usually been a fan of van Hove’s garish intrusions, which too often literalized sexual and aggressive drives in ways that made nonsense of the repressive worlds from which they arose. So I thought I was in for more of the same when NYTW announced that it would be producing a version of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage that van Hove had conceived and directed for his company, Toneelgroep Amsterdam. All anyone was talking about was the staging — and perhaps a part of the director’s motivation for erecting elaborate superstructures around his favorite texts is to draw attention to his own creativity. But what of Bergman’s? Scenes From a Marriage, shown in six episodes on Sweden television in 1973 and then released as a shorter theatrical film, is a major statement from a major artist on a major human dilemma. Was it to be reduced to an avant-garde plaything, a lazy Susan of stage gimcrackery?