The midnight sun on Dramaten

The double contract 2020 with Karl Ove Knausgård

With Midnatsolen på Dramaten, Poul Behrendt expands and radicalises his concept of the double contract in relation to Karl Ove Knausgård's main work. With the focal point for everything in the first book of Morgenstjernen, 2020.

Everything that Knausgård has written over the past twelve years turns out here to ultimately have its starting point in Ingmar Bergman's staging of Henrik Ibsen's Gengangere at Dramaten in the spring of 2002. Where the Swedish director, who was also the drama's radical at the same time ” new translator", had turned the Norwegian classic upside down. Without any reviewers understanding a word of it all at the premiere – or for that matter Min kamp's readers seven years later.

From having been for a hundred years a poor, ignorant victim of the corrupt intrigues of a generation of parents, Osvald appeared here transformed into the supreme consciousness of tragedy. It was no longer Henrik Ibsen's pious villain, carpenter Engstrand, who sets fire to his father's house. But Osvald himself, who over the previous hundred years has otherwise ended the drama with his familiar prayer, over and over again: "Sun, Mother! Give me the sun!”. Instead, he is now presented by the director, through the backdrop in the last scene, with a giga luminous celestial body, which at the same time burns into the audience's eyes.

It was the same sun that was subsequently to pave the way for the reunion of the two unhappy lovers, Linda & Karl Ove, who had otherwise sat closely separated in separate seats in Stockholm. And ultimately deliver the key, not just to Min kamp 's five books. But also for Morgenstjernen's expected seven days of creation.

"Well-written and accurate work, which becomes a key to especially Karl Ove Knausgaard's books, but which also explains new trends in contemporary art and literature", Thomas Olesen, lecturer's opinion

Jan Maintz, review in Information 8 October 2021:
"Behrendt's production is a sharp cone of light over the new literary landscape. This also applies to his new book, where the concept of narrative fiction in particular works strongly enlightening (...) if you want to gain insight into Knausgård's biography, compositional principles and formal relationships, you must read Behrendt's well-laid out and detective-sharp dissections. Like another Sherlock Holmes, he is a master at seeing what the rest of us overlook."