**3. Post-Naturalist Theater**

The use of montage, music, song, and dance in *Vår ære og vår makt* would not have been thinkable without the post-naturalist "retheatricalization" of theater that took place in early twentieth-century Scandinavia, as elsewhere in Europe (Marker and Marker 1975, p. 205). In the Nordic context, Pär Lagerkvist's essay "Modern Teater", from 1918, was an important anti-naturalist manifesto. Lagerkvist called for a move away from the domestic "conversation" drama associated with Ibsen, and toward a theater that employed a wider range of art forms and effects. His main precedent was the expressionism of Strindberg's post-Inferno drama. Lagerkvist thought that naturalist interior dramas went against the very essence of theater. He faulted naturalism for being totally indifferent to the presence of the audience, and for being overly focused on the spoken word at the expense of the modern theater's visual and lyrical possibilities (Lagerkvist [1918] 1956, pp. 11, 15).

In the Russian context, Vsevolod Meyerhold's essay on "The Reconstruction of the Theatre" contains a similar denunciation of naturalism, while it also shows an appreciation of contradictions, confrontations, and polemics. Writing in 1929, Meyerhold contends that the modern masses desire an emotionally rich and varied experience at the theater, not an intellectual discourse or a "debating chamber" (Meyerhold [1929] 1995, pp. 98–99). The task of the theater is to awaken and strengthen the life-affirming optimism of the revolution, and to give an invigorating emotional shock to the audience (Meyerhold [1929] 1995, p. 100). Meyerhold also notes that the taste of the modern spectator has been re-educated by the stylized productions of post-revolutionary Constructivist design, and that realistic scenery and characterization are unnecessary.

Post-naturalist theater for Meyerhold, as for others in the interwar period, was becoming musical and multidimensional, taking in cinema, revue songs, dance, and gymnastics. His famed style of acting, biomechanics, emphasized the physical dexterity of the actor's body and the reduction of story elements into tasks that could be performed efficiently (Pitches 2003, p. 73). The Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti had already in 1913 pointed to music hall, variety theater, and popular entertainment as the model for a vibrant theater in his Manifesto. This use of popular entertainment and energetic physical movements became a dominant feature of the Soviet theater aesthetic in the post-revolutionary years, in what has been called a "circusization" of theater (Senelick and Ostrovsky 2014, p. 185). Similarly, the Norwegian *arbeiderteater* (worker's theater) of the 1920s moved away from naturalism to incorporate a broader range of theatrical effects, including agitprop and music hall songs (Dahl 1984, p. 422). As we will see, *Vår ære og vår makt* draws on these interwar theatrical trends by incorporating music hall, revue, jazz, and dance elements. It also makes ample use of diegetic music and song, including traditional Scandinavian sailor's songs and drinking songs.

In the avant-garde Soviet theater and film of the 1920s, montage was theorized and practiced by Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold, the latter of whom was especially influential for Grieg. Montage in the theater refers to an episodic structure of successive, self-contained scenes, which are linked by abrupt and contrasting transitions, with breaks in continuity to keep the audience alert and surprised. In theatrical montage, stylized scenes and images are often juxtaposed to surprising or polemical effect, and two or more parallel storylines are possible (Pitches 2003, p. 75). Grieg's use of a montage technique is not radically experimental; the rhetorical purpose of montage in *Vår ære og vår makt* is never ambiguous or subtle. In addition, the play consists of a fairly continuous narrative told in a linear and causal fashion, and it does not approach anything like a radical breakdown of storytelling syntax that other forms of modernist montage might attempt. However, *Vår ære og vår makt* does have an episodic structure of two contrasting parallel storylines, linked by dissonant and explosive transitions. The shifts between scenes of sailors and ship-owners, labor and capital, produce a *grotesque* effect, in Meyerhold's sense of the term: a style based on sharp contradictions and incongruous elements that shock the audience and resonate in their minds (Pitches 2003, p. 61).

## **4. Grotesque Contradictions**

*Vår ære og vår makt* opens with just such a grotesque moment of incongruity. The orchestra plays "Syng meg hjem", a sentimental sailor's song based on a text by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, while onstage a sailor's coffin is shown covered by a Norwegian flag. The elegiac image does not last, however: "The music suddenly breaks into a wild dissonance, like an explosion. The date '1917' is projected in flames." ("Musikken sprenges plutselig i vill dissonans, som en ekplosjon. Årstallet "1917" flammer imot oss.") (Grieg [1935] 1975, p. 123).<sup>1</sup> Grieg uses the device of dissonant sound to interrupt the commemoration of the fallen soldier and go back in time eighteen years, to a challenging and even traumatic topic in the collective memory of the original audience. This interruption suggests that the fallen sailor cannot ye<sup>t</sup> be buried, because the reckoning with the past has not ye<sup>t</sup> taken place. In this way, the play uses a visual and musical jolt to announce its intentions to explore a touchy wartime subject.

The curtain is drawn aside to reveal the office of the greedy ship-owners. Ditlef S. Mathiesen and his brother-in-law Freddy Bang have grown rich from war profits (ships, stocks, and speculation). In the opening scene, we see Ditlef refuse to consider a raise for the struggling wage-earning seamen, only to immediately give his secretary more than twice the seamen's monthly earnings so she can take a restorative vacation to the mountains (Grieg [1935] 1975, p. 124). Even more offensive is Freddy Bang, who has just arranged for a teenager he impregnated to have a secret abortion (ibid., p. 127). He convinces her brother, Konrad, to keep the affair secret in exchange for getting in on a money-making ship deal (ibid., p.129). Ditlef, who speaks in a broad Bergen dialect, is depicted as a sentimental family man who uses his children to soothe his bad conscience about profiting from war and putting sailors in danger, while Freddy is a lecherous cartoon.

Grieg's characterization has little psychological complexity, but this was not the point. He was perfectly content with the pedagogical and tendentious use of characters, since he was not interested in naturalism, but in social structures and class guilt. Contrasting with the unsympathetic portrayal

<sup>1</sup> *Vår ære og vår makt* was translated to English as "Our Power and Our Glory" by G. M. Gathorne-Hardy (Grieg 1971). The English versions provided here are based on that translation, but usually modified. All other translations from Norwegian are my own.

of the ship-owners is Grieg's sentimental and admiring depiction of the sailors and their families. One harsh critic of the play, Alf Larsen, even described Grieg's attitude toward the sailors as "servile" (Egeland 1953, p. 169). Such partisanship was not an artistic flaw, but an essential part of Grieg's polemic. During his time in the Soviet Union, he learned to shun ambivalence and the gray zone, praising what he saw as the purity of the post-revolutionary constructive will and the clear distinctions between contrasts. Grieg wrote in the essay "Teatret og livet" that Russia was a place "where love and hate do not flow together; where the climate is fire and ice" ("hvor hat og kjærlighet ikke flyter sammen; hvor klimaet er is og flammer") (Grieg 1947, p. 167). I will discuss this essay further below.

Many of the play's most interesting scenic shifts and juxtapositions occur in the second act. This act takes place on board a German U-boat (scene 2), then on board the "Vargefjell" during the torpedo attack (scene 3), then in a restaurant where Ditlef, Freddy, and others are having a party (scene 4), and finally in a lifeboat on the cold seas (scene 5). When the ship "Vargefjell" is hit by the torpedo, a scream is heard, the sailors Henry and Vingrisen identify the victim as Ingolf, and the scene ends with these instructions:

*(The scream grows into a moaning, wailing death cry. As the curtain falls, the orchestra strikes up a music-hall tune. An actor, full of health and high spirits, comes forward quickly, and sings the popular song of the boom years: "Who goes there? Who goes there?" During the last verse he is accompanied by six chorus girls, masked as jovial sailors.)*

### *(Skriket stiger til et stønnende, jamrende dødskrik):*

*(I samme øieblikk teppet går sammen, smeller orkestret i med en revymelodi. En skuespiller kommer ilende frem, frodig, full av humør og synger jobbetidsvisen: "Hvem kommer der? Hvem kommer der?" I siste vers har han med sig seks chorus-girls, maskert som muntre gaster.)*

## (Grieg [1935] 1975, p. 152)

The theatrical use of a popular melody from the boom years becomes part of the blunt political message: the greedy ship-owners enjoy their profits, invest in copper stocks, and gain insurance money from shipwrecks, while underpaid sailors risk their lives and fall victim to German torpedo attacks. The festive song and dance routine literally conceals the death of a sailor on stage, while the chorus girls wear masks that project the lie of happy sailors to the audience. The use of the chorus girls in this transition is both entertaining and confrontational. Being entertained by the chorus girls and the song makes the audience complicit in an act of concealment and forgetting.

In the next scene, the ship owners enjoy a dinner party at a restaurant with musical entertainment. Konrad plays the simple drinking song "Gubba Noah" ("Gubben Noak", by Carl Michael Bellman) on the piano, and soon the chorus girls join the party and engage Konrad and the uncouth Birger in "a grotesque dance". Also present is a Russian violinist, Sascha Erdman, who plays melancholy folk music for the group, after which Birger smashes the violin to use as firewood to warm up the room. The general message of the scene is that the ship-owners are uncultured and destructive *nouveaux riches*, enjoying their war profits and women while the wage-earning sailors are torpedoed at sea. After his violin is destroyed, Sascha Erdman gives a revolutionary warning: "There are many like you in the world: one day, I believe, you will all have the same fate!" ("Det er mange som dere i verden; én dag, tror jeg, skal dere alle få samme skjebne!") (Grieg [1935] 1975, p. 157).

The restaurant scene ends with a segue to the next scene via the word "øs", the imperative form of a verb that can mean "to pour" or "to bail out" (as a boat). The ship-owners want to help Konrad stay awake for the debauchery by pouring more wine: "Øs, Konrad, øs!" shouts Birger. At the start of the next scene, the sailors Vingrisen, Henry, and others are trying to remove water from their lifeboat; three men on the boat have already frozen to death. A frantic sailor shouts "Øs, øs!" (ibid., p. 158). Between these scenes, the musical accompaniment is a jazz rendition of the sailor song "Siste reis" ("Sailor's Last Voyage"), which is based on a Romantic poem about a dying sailor by Henrik Wergeland. The musical style gradually changes from jazz into "the real tune, played with all its painful solemnity" ("den virkelige melodien, spilt med hele sin orgelsmerte") (ibid., p. 157).

The use of jazz music in this case carries the connotation of popular entertainment, frivolity, and festivity, in contrast to the mournful tones of the organ and the solemn sea-romanticism of the original dirge. A moment of grotesque visual continuity accompanies the music, according to the following stage instruction: "the dead-drunk figure from the party have a sort of echo in the men frozen to death in the lifeboat" ("de døddrukne skikkelsene fra festen, har et slags ekko i de ihjelfrosne i båten") (ibid., p. 157). The montage rhetoric could not be more pointed: some are dead-drunk, others are just dead. As the second act concludes on the lifeboat, the sailors are freezing and longing for home, so Vingrisen sings a tune to hold up their spirits: the song "Eg har forlotte Bergen for bestandig" ("I Have Left Bergen For Good"). The young father Henry dies, but the others don't give up. Defiant in the face of the bitter wind, Vingrisen continues to sing his song as the curtain falls. In the final act of *Vår ære og vår makt*, Olsen's espionage is discovered, and a debate ensues among the characters about whether to blame the spies or the capitalist ship-owners for the deaths of the Norwegian sailors.

More important for the present discussion is the epilogue Grieg gave to the play, to ensure that the 1935 audience could not view the wartime events from a comfortably historicizing distance. He explained the intention of the epilogue in the following terms: "Now that a new war is threatening the world, I have wanted to address the problems from the previous one. I believe that in 1914–1918, we lost our high ethical position among nations. And if we have any hope to avoid repeating our complicity, then a real *recognition* is necessary". ("Nå da en ny krig truer verden, har jeg villet ta op problemene fra den forrige. Jeg mener at vi i 1914–1918 forspilte vår høie etiske stilling mellem folkene. Og skal vi ha noge<sup>t</sup> håp om ikke å gjenta vår delaktighet, er erkjennelsen nødvendig.") (Egeland 1953, p. 164). The epilogue raises the question of who Norwegians should be in the future: complicit war profiteers, or ethically laudable workers against war. First, an actor planted in the audience stands up and claims that all this nasty business during the war was lamentable, but it was long ago. In this way, Grieg anticipates the defensive reaction of the Norwegian theater-goers and answers it preemptively with additional scenes set in the present. After the fake audience member speaks, a gong strikes and the year 1935 glows on the curtain, just as 1917 did at the beginning of the play. The audience then sees a scene from depression-era Norway: a homeless shelter full of out-of-work sailors, among them Vingrisen (who was based on an actual sailor Grieg met during his research in Bergen.) The next part of the epilogue shows Ditlef and Freddy standing in front of the curtain, discussing the desperate economic situation. Ditlef states that only *one thing* can improve the depression; it is implied that this would be the empty ships anchored in the harbor being requisitioned in a new war. Ditlef then opens a newspaper and reads headlines aloud: "Better Outlook for Shipping." "Will There Be War in the East?" ("Det lysner for skibsfarten. Blir det krig i Østen?") (Grieg [1935] 1975, p. 179). A wild drumroll starts up and the curtain is thrown aside. The stage directions read: "the whole play seems to explode in an atmosphere of speculation and war. On a moving band, soldiers approach with steel helmets and bayonets" ("det er som hele stykket eksploderer i en atmosfære av børs og krig. På et rullende bånd kommer soldater imot oss, med stålhjelm og bajonett") (ibid., p. 179). On one side of the soldier assembly line are the ship-owners and "børsmennesket" (called "Stock-Exchange Creature" in Gathorne-Hardy's translation), and on the other side are the sailors, a young worker, and a woman.

The play ends with the opposition of capital and labor clearly rendered in the division of characters into groups. While those on the side of capital shout slogans about the enterprising spirit and personal initiative, soldiers are shot down by machine guns positioned above the audience in the theater hall. Again, the audience is made complicit in the violence and death they witness onstage. An idealized woman-figure, representing peace, harmony, hope, youth, and human dignity, voices her opposition to the capitalists' greed and opportunism. "Stock-Exchange Creature" repeats "Better Outlook for Shipping". "Will There Be War in the East?" ("Det lysner for skibsfarten. Blir det krig i Østen?"), to which the sailors and workers shout a resounding "No!" ("Nei!") from a stylized ship-construction flying a Norwegian flag, as the sirens start to blare in a call for a general strike. Norway cannot be neutral in this struggle, Grieg suggests, and it is the responsibility of the working class to avert the

coming capitalist-driven war. The concluding sirens send a warning to the audience about the fateful, contradictory choices ahead, rather than an unambiguously positive ending or simple victory.

## **5. Soviet Dreams**

Naturally, Grieg's play was accused of being revolutionary Communist propaganda and even "violating the neutrality of the stage" (Hoem 1989, p. 208). This is a predictable reaction, especially since Grieg had become known to the Norwegian public as an ardent supporter of the Soviet Union both during and after his visit there. To properly contextualize Grieg's tendentious play, we need to understand his aesthetic appropriation of Soviet theater as an integral part of his larger ideological embrace of the Communist project. When Grieg decided to visit the Soviet Union, he was not ye<sup>t</sup> a convinced Communist. The trip turned out to be an experience of conversion and revitalization after period of exhaustion and pessimism. His 1932 drama *Atlanterhavet* (The Atlantic) had been a struggle and a flop, and it pointed to an artistic impasse. The turn to Soviet Communism gave him a new grounding: he wrote to his mother in January of 1934 that, "my stay in Russia has given me so much, new belief and new joy" ("Mitt Russlands-ophold har gitt mig meget, ny tro og ny glæde") (Vold 1983, p. 102). In the same letter, Grieg explained that the classless, patriotic Soviet Union should be Norway's new role model for revolution, just as the French revolution had inspired the Norwegian constitution of 1814. He began to understand his previous ideas about the Soviet Union as misrepresentations. Toward the end of his stay, he wrote in a letter to his sister Ingeborg that everything written in the Norwegian press about Soviet conditions—both for and against—was incorrect (Vold 1983, p. 102).

When he arrived early in 1933, the Soviet Union had just been through an intense period of rapid industrialization and massive forced collectivization under the first Five-Year Plan. Much suffering and hardship was caused in farming areas, including the persecution of the *kulaks* (relatively well-off peasants). In addition, Grieg's arrival in the Soviet Union coincided with the systematic starvation of millions in The Great Famine or *Holodomor* in Ukraine. The early 1930s in Stalin's Russia were also a time when cultural control was being centralized and social repression was heightened. Grieg was in fact present as an observer at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, when socialist realism was proclaimed as the only acceptable artistic style, ending an incredible period of experimentation and innovation in Soviet theater and initiating a return to the classics. There, he might have heard Maksim Gorky define the official style in terms of "the uninterrupted development of the priceless individual faculties of man" and the unification of humanity (Senelick and Ostrovsky 2014, p. 361). Socialist realism was opposed to modern developments that were considered bourgeois or lumped under the epithet "formalism", and it was supposed to educate the public in the socialist spirit. On 1 November 1935, only half a year after the Bergen premiere of *Vår ære og vår makt,* official Soviet censorship was reconfirmed in a decree: all plays, films, and other performances would be reviewed by censors at least ten days before opening, and two seats at each performance would be reserved for censors (ibid., p. 350).

While in the Soviet Union in 1933–1934, Grieg attended performances at the Moscow Art Theater and Meyerhold's Theater, among other locations in Moscow and Tbilisi. He communicated his understanding of Soviet theater—and of censorship and freedom of expression—to Norwegian audiences in his 1934 article "Teatret og livet" ("Theater and Life") and his 1935 lecture "Teater i Sovjetunionen" ("Theater in the Soviet Union"). In the latter, which was printed in *Arbeidet*, Grieg enthusiastically discusses the Russian directors Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, Nikolay Okhlopkov, and the Georgian director Sandro Akhmeteli. In "Teatret og livet", originally published in *Tidens Tegn* on 2 June 1934, Grieg praises Soviet theater for its constructive will and its positive, edifying social role: "the same appeal is heard in everything: onward" ("gjennom alt smeller en appell: videre") (Grieg 1947, p. 166.). He claims that "criticism is tolerated in the newspapers here, but never skepticism" ("kritikk tåles i avisene her, men aldri skepsis") (ibid., p. 168). Grieg does not pause to consider who decides what forms of skepticism and doubt are intolerable but moves on to praise the

instrumental use of theater in Russia: "theaters are in the service of the new dawn that will come tomorrow, after the stage lights are put out" ("teatre tjener den nye morgendagen som skal gråne efter at rampelysene er slokt") (ibid., p. 168).

Noting that the present age is depicted rather simplistically in Soviet art, Grieg considers whether this might be due to censorship, as others in Norway might think. He corrects this false impression: rather than censorship, "it can be more correctly explained as a new life-feeling" ("det kan riktigere forklares som en ny livsfølelse") in which many cherished truths are dead, including those of Ibsen's bourgeois individualism (ibid., p. 173). A new country is being built, and also a "new man", and the theater has a role to play in forming this new world. "Teatret og livet" contains little about specific theatrical methods and techniques. Rather, it is concerned with the role of theater in communist society, and it shows both Grieg's openness to the political or didactic instrumentalization of theater and his defense of censorship in the name of affirmation and "the constructive will."

Part of what appealed to Grieg about theater and literature in the Soviet Union was that it represented an alternative to what he called "*forsiktighetsdiktningen*", a cautious, skeptical, and pessimistic kind of writing that he thought had become the dominant current in the West since the 1920s. In the essay "En ny verdensvei" ("A New Path for the World"), written in Moscow in the summer of 1934, Grieg named Ernest Hemingway and Sigurd Hoel as representatives of this tendency (Grieg 1947, p. 180). Opposed to such caution, Grieg lauded the Soviet literature of enthusiasm and action, exemplified by the futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky: loud, thundering words, at full throttle. His enthusiasm and faith in the Soviet future was at its height as he returned to Norway before Christmas in 1934. Earlier that same month, the Communist party central committee member Sergey Kirov was murdered in his office. This became the event that marked the beginning of the Stalinist purges, arrests, and executions. Grieg defended the purges that ensued after the murder of Kirov: writing in *Arbeidet*, on 9 January 1935, he dismissed H. G. Wells' concerns about the lack of freedom of conscience and speech, writing, "Of course, I can take no part in the dismay that most humanist-minded people feel about the mass arrests" ("Jeg kan selvsagt på ingen måte delta i den forferdelse som de fleste 'humanistisk' innstillede mennesker føler over massehenrettelsene") (Grieg 1982, pp. 41–42).

When considering this era, it is important to bear in mind that the rise of Hitler's Third Reich and the Great Depression brought pressure to bear on many people's understanding of Stalin's Russia. As the historian Mark Mazower has written, the Soviet Union appeared to many sympathetic, anti-fascist observers on the left in the 1930s as "a striking contrast to the West—an image of energy, commitment, collective achievement and modernity" (Mazower 1998, pp. 124–25). In Britain, for example, leading figures in the British Labour Party Sidney and Beatrice Webb famously published a tract in praise of Stalinism in the same year that *Vår ære og vår makt* had its premiere: it was called *Soviet Russia: A New Civilization?*, and it was reprinted in 1937 without the question mark (Kershaw 2015, p. 450).

Even after colleagues on the left such as Arnulf Øverland openly shed their Communist sympathies, Grieg maintained his vision of the Soviet Union as the sole agen<sup>t</sup> of peace and justice in a Europe threatened by fascist destruction and capitalist war. Tragically, both Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sandro Akhmeteli, key influences for Grieg, were arrested, tortured, and executed within five years of the Bergen premiere of *Vår ære og vår makt*. Meyerhold's theater was liquidated in 1938 for being "alien to Soviet art", and he was arrested, tortured, and executed in 1940 (Senelick and Ostrovsky 2014, pp. 402, 407–8). Akhmeteli was arrested on charges of espionage, then tortured and executed in November 1936 (ibid., p. 441). This took place only a few years after Grieg was entranced in Tbilisi by his production of Schiller's *Die Räuber* (Grieg 1982, p. 56). Of course, Grieg could not have predicted any of this, and it is not clear how he reacted if he found out. It remains the case, however, that Grieg went significantly further in his defense of Stalinist repression than many other Norwegian writers with Soviet sympathies, both dismissing concerns about censorship and defending the notorious show trials. When the first news of Stalin's show trials came out in the summer of 1936, a group of leading Norwegian authors that included both Sigurd

Hoel and Arnulf Øverland made a public declaration decrying the death sentences as a miscarriage of justice (Dahl 1984, p. 60). Hoel printed a sober critique of the trials in Grieg's anti-fascist periodical *Veien frem* early in 1937, to which Grieg and the Danish communist author Hans Kirk responded in the next issue. Kirk mocked Hoel for having an overly aestheticized and academic relationship to Marxism (ibid., p. 61). In his February 1937 article "Dramaet i Moskva" ("The Drama in Moscow"), Grieg portrayed one of those sentenced in the trials, Karl Radek, as "a sacrifice for a historical necessity") ("et offer for en historisk nødvendighet") and saw in the trials a tragic inner conflict of Stalin's "will to victory" ("seiersvilje") (Grieg 1947, pp. 126–27). It was a task of the worker's democracy, he suggested, to minimize such collateral damage. For Grieg, Soviet Russia continued to be the bright spot of hope in a time of fascism, economic depression, and hypocritical bourgeois humanism, a position he expressed clearly in his 1938 political novel of ideas, *Ung må verden ennu være.*
