Ásdís R. Magnúsdóttir will first discuss the continued presence of French comedy in Iceland (Molière, Feydeau, Camoletti, Zeller) and the adaptations that seem to have contributed to their popularity. French farces and comedies were part of Icelandic theatre since the beginning of its history at the end of the 18th century. In its first decades, amateur theatre groups staged the very first Icelandic plays whereas the works of Danish playwrights and Molière were also prominent in the repertoire. The number of Icelandic plays gradually increased, and in the late 20th century they accounted for 40% of all works that had been staged in Icelandic theatres, which was unique in the Nordic countries. Nevertheless, the comedy and the farce still appeal to the Icelandic audience and many Icelandic actors have had the opportunity to work with experts in the commedia dell'arte tradition such as Mario Gonzalez from the Théâtre du Soleil (Sun Theatre) in Paris.
Second, Gudrun Kristinsdottir will focus on the cultural leap of the alexandrine or the French neo-classical theatre in translation. Attempts were made to introduce French neo-classic theatre in verse in Iceland, mainly on the initiative of individuals who had come to appreciate this theatre during their studies in Paris. These “cultural ambassadors“ met with many challenges, the ardousness of which explains the rarity of the endeavours and their succès d’estime. They had to find French speaking poets for the verse translations, who had to come up with solutions to translate the alexandrines in the absence of an Icelandic dramatic verse tradition which, in turn, posed the problem of the acting styles and the reception by the audience of the poetic text in performance. Another major problem they had to face concerned the centre/margin cultural gap; they had to prove the relevance of the French court plays in the context of a newfound republic (1944) and former colony. In this talk, Kristinsdottir will analyze how the political point of the plays come across, if indeed it did, and how the otherness of the plays tended to resist the cultural domestication efforts exerted on them.
Finally, Irma Erlingsdóttir will discuss French post-structuralism and feminism on the Icelandic stage as they appear in the works of film director Kristín Jóhannesdóttir.
Kristín Jóhannesdóttir (born 1948), an Icelandic writer and film director, known for her films Alma (2021), As in Heaven (1992) and Rainbow’s End (1983), was for a long time the only female filmmaker in Iceland. Instead of making attempts at mimesis in her work – as her fellow male filmmakers did, she bypassed ordinary logic and defamiliarized reality in search of unclassified cases as expressed in hidden or frustrated truths. To French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, mimesis maintains the feminine as other. To counter this understanding, she argued for what she called “parler-femme” (“womenspeak”) with the aim of disrupting structures of specularisation. Jóhannesdóttir’s work is highly influenced by French post-structuralist thought, especially its feminist manifestations – the dominant critical discourse in the late 1960s and 1970s – when she studied and lived in France. In this talk, Erlingsdóttir will explore Jóhannesdóttir’s films, focusing on the influence of post- structuralism and its ethical, social, political and aesthetic implications. Jóhannesdóttir has described her work as being driven by a “limitless curiosity” for the strange in the familiar. As will be shown, this is translated in her work both in terms of the choice of topics she deals with and the camera angles she employs.