Kjeld Abell

• Born: August 25, 1901
• Birthplace: Ribe, Denmark
• Died: March 5, 1961
• Place of death: Copenhagen, Denmark

Other Literary Forms

In addition to writing his own plays, Kjeld Abell translated several others into Danish. Two of those, Columbe (pr. 1951; Mademoiselle Colombe, 1954) and Beckett: Ou, L’Honneur de Dieu (pr., pb. 1959; Beckett: Or, The Honor of God, 1962), were by Jean Anouilh. Others were Robert E. Sherwood’s Idiot’s Delight (pr., pb. 1936), Jean Giraudoux’s Pour Lucrèce (wr. 1944, pr., pb. 1953; Duel of Angels, 1958), and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (pr. c. 1595-1596). Abell wrote scenarios for ballets, screenplays for motion pictures, and numerous revue sketches.

Abell wrote a children’s book, Paraplyernes oprør (1937; the revolt of the umbrellas), which he also illustrated, several short tales, and a small number of published poems. His most significant nondramatic writings were many essays on the nature of the theater, especially the autobiographical Teaterstrejf i paaskevejr (1948; theater sketches in Easter weather) and two travel books, Fodnoter i støvet (1951; footnotes in the dust) and De tre fra Minikoi (1957; Three from Minikoi, 1960). The latter is a fanciful account of the author’s two trips to China, while the former travel book chronicles his first journey to the Far East in 1950-1951.

Achievements

Along with the playwright-pastor Kaj Munk, Kjeld Abell was known as one of Denmark’s leading dramatists of the twentieth century. After Munk’s death at the hands of the Nazis in 1944, Abell stood alone as the prime standard-bearer of Danish theater. His career spanned more than a quarter of a century, and his artistic presence was only increased by the fact that he was active in so many creative fields—literature, ballet, film, painting, and journalism. Not even his critics would deny that Abell’s consistent production dominated the middle third of the twentieth century, and no one has emerged to assume his mantle in the subsequent years.

While Abell, like his kindred spirit Hans Christian Andersen, was thoroughly Danish in his style and outlook, he enriched his nation’s culture by incorporating other European impulses into his work. His exposure to Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris and his subsequent work in Copenhagen as assistant to George Balanchine, Diaghilev’s last ballet master, helped bring the Diaghilev style to the Danish stage: a synthesis of several creative forces—music, art, choreography, athleticism—to produce a unified artistic whole. The French presence was also felt in Abell’s indebtedness to the great director Louis Jouvet and the playwright Jean Giraudoux, both of whose work he admired. The works of other Scandinavian playwrights, such as August Strindberg and Nordahl Grieg, are also represented in Abell’s œuvre, as are the foreign playwrights whose works he translated for the Danish stage.

Another well-deserved title for Abell was that of liberator—he, more than anyone else, has been credited with freeing Danish theater from its slavish adherence to the naturalistic tradition. Even though few Danish plays were written in the naturalistic style, virtually all those produced in the first part of the twentieth century followed the strict naturalistic demands: almost photographic reproduction of “real life,” strong audience identification with the characters onstage, the imaginary “ fourth wall ” to create the illusion that the audience is not witnessing a play but is privy to a “real” event, and the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action. Naturalism represented more than a convention; it had become a form of artistic tyranny, and though others spoke out, Abell took the lead in liberating the Danish stage from its strictures.

The form of his plays is open and innovative. His works are loosely constructed (too loosely, said his critics) and episodic, particularly his debut piece, The Melody That Got Lost, which teems with song, dance, and revue-style humor. Abell’s later plays appeal to the senses, as light, color, music, movement, symbols, and the spoken word blend to encourage the most important element of his theater: fantasy. Many of his plays possess a dreamlike quality that destroys the bonds of time and space and frees the spectator to enjoy a subjective theater experience.

Abell was also innovative in the content of his plays, the consistent theme of which is freedom. The three stages of his dramatic career proclaim three types of freedom: from bourgeois culture, from political tyranny, and from fear and isolation. Because he fought for freedom, not with heavy-handed rhetoric but with grace, wit, and nostalgia, one critic has aptly named him “the revolutionary romanticist,” while another called him “an artist with a witticism in one hand and a smoking bomb in the other.”

In freeing Danish culture from the hold of naturalism, Abell gave it a new concept of theater. Theater, he said, possessed a “soul,” born of the communication between stage and audience. Questions posed by the playwright and suggestively transmitted through dialogue, movement, and symbols are answered only when the audience is an active participant in the experience of theater, “the fantastic sanctuary of free thought.”

Biography

Kjeld Abell’s life was marked by controversy and contradictions. Called Denmark’s leading modern dramatist, he was also at times vilified by the public for his leftist political sympathies and mocked by the literary critics for his strangely symbolic, highly personal plays. Friends and critics alike seemed divided about Abell’s true calling as an artist, and the playwright himself did little to resolve their questions. On the one hand, Abell was called “above all a playwright of ideas,” on the other, “a great writer for the theater but a weak thinker.” Both Abell’s moody, capricious temperament and his unwillingness to give an unambiguous explanation of his art contributed to the paradoxical quality that marked his thirty-year career in the theater.

Abell was born August 25, 1901, in the provincial town of Ribe on the Danish west coast. The son of a schoolteacher, he dutifully completed his studies in economics and political science at Copenhagen University, but his previous work at the Royal Academy of Art and a growing fascination with the theater exerted a greater hold on him. Above all, it was a 1920 production of Strindberg’s Spöksonaten (pb. 1907; The Ghost Sonata, 1916) that served as the catalyst for Abell’s lifelong commitment to theater. In Teaterstrejf i paaskevejr, he wrote of this experience, “I stopped thinking. In the brief moments in which the catastrophe took place, there was only time to feel. I felt with my eyes, my ears, my whole being.”

Immediately after graduation in 1927, Abell was married and traveled to Paris for what amounted to an apprenticeship in the theater. He painted scenery and absorbed the artistic impulses of the Paris theater and ballet world. His entrée to Danish theater came in 1930-1931, as stage designer for Balanchine’s guest season in Copenhagen, after which he worked for three years as a graphic artist with an advertising agency.

After writing the scenario for the experimental ballet Enken i spejlet (1934; the widow in the mirror), Abell scored his professional breakthrough with the enormously successful The Melody That Got Lost. Other plays followed, as did film manuscripts, revue sketches, and leadership in Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen’s elegant amusement park. In 1944, Abell was forced to go underground in occupied Denmark and later in neutral Sweden. He had interrupted a production at the Royal Theater to bid his countrymen to pay tribute to the martyred Kaj Munk.

After the war, Abell’s dramas continued to deal with current topics: the resistance movement, the dawning of the atomic age, and a sense of growing isolation, fear, and despair. The playwright and his wife were fascinated by the Far East and made three trips there that resulted in two colorful travel books. Abell’s final plays continued to provide fine theater, but their often obscure symbolism left many critics and spectators confused about their meaning. To some, their proclamations of life and vitality seemed unconvincing and forced.

On March 5, 1961, Abell died suddenly of a stroke suffered at his home in Copenhagen. His final play Skriget (the scream), was produced posthumously in November of that year.

Analysis

Common to virtually all Kjeld Abell’s plays are the qualities of innovation, fantasy, and delight in the possibilities of the theater. Because of his background as a stage and graphic artist, his was a visually oriented drama, drawing on clever sets, stage tricks, and symbols to create the atmosphere he believed necessary to activate the audience. From sight gags in his early works through flashbacks, dream sequences, and the blending of past, present, and future time in his later ones, Abell consistently explored the rich possibilities of the stage. All too frequently, however, the formal structure of the play was subordinated to the author’s pleasure in creating a theater experience. Throughout his career, Abell was praised for his devotion to the magic of theater while being faulted for unclear or unresolved plots.

Also common to most of his plays is the theme of rebellion against the prevailing social structure and the praise of human freedom and fellowship. Abell’s variations on this theme roughly correspond to the concerns of Danish and European society in the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s, and for each decade there is a single drama that best represents Abell’s work of that era. The Melody That Got Lost reflects the concern of the 1930’s with the tyranny of bourgeois life and the appeal of leftist politics as a possible alternative. Anna Sophie Hedvig, written only months before the outbreak of World War II, challenges the political tyranny and public apathy that marked the prewar and war years. Finally, Den blå pekingeser (the blue Pekinese) seeks to combat the feeling of fear and isolation that arose after the war and persisted into the 1950’s.

The Melody That Got Lost

Abell burst onto the scene in the 1930’s with three social satires—a ballet, Enken i spejlet; a musical, The Melody That Got Lost; and a comedy, Eva aftjener sin barnepligt (Eve serves her childhood duty)—the second of which attained the greatest success and became the signature work of Abell’s career. The Melody That Got Lost was staged at a small experimental theater in Copenhagen that was well suited to its light, colloquial tone. Danish audiences, accustomed as they were to ponderous, naturalistic productions, were enchanted by the inventive vitality of this work and responded by attending a record-breaking 594 performances.

The play, which has two acts containing twenty-one loosely connected revue or cabaret-style scenes, is enlivened by songs, the lyrics of which were composed by Sven Møller Kristensen, later a professor of literature. It is marked by numerous scenic plays calculated to entertain and stimulate the audience. Characters in the play directly address the audience, and a spectator climbs onto the stage to express his concern about the development of the play. Wedding plans, ceremony, reception, and honeymoon are telescoped into one brief, symbolic scene, with the ceremony itself represented by a spotlighted bridal veil, bouquet, and top hat passing across an empty stage. The dreariness of a typical day at the office is similarly compressed into brief but revealing scenes of song, dance, and mime, while offstage voices, wires, and rolling sets generate further novelty.

In addition to entertaining, Abell’s gimmicks also illustrate the depersonalized nature of the characters. The protagonist is Larsen, an undistinguished member of the “white-collar proletariat,” a “very nicely dressed” product of “very nice” parents and schools. His hope for a more exciting life is represented by a recurring light melody and a gaudy sheik’s costume, but this hope is threatened by the tyranny of conformity at work and at home.

The three typists at his office, all called Miss Møller, wear identical photographic masks and refer to themselves as copies and automatons. Their employer gruffly tells them not to expect any change in their dull routine and tries to stifle Larsen’s enjoyment of life’s melody by threatening to fire him.

Similar pressure is exerted by the parents of Larsen’s fiancée, Edith. They are first seen in a giant photograph of their living room, with only the actors’ faces visible through holes cut out of the screen. The father is small and timid, the mother, large and domineering, and she manipulates Larsen and Edith so that they renounce life’s melody. In their desire to obtain the material gifts proffered by the parents, they agree to conform to the middle-class conventions that celebrate niceness, order, and cleanliness at the expense of joy and adventure, and with that agreement, the sheik’s costume symbolically sails upward.

Larsen and Edith’s miserable life without the melody is brilliantly depicted by Abell in the last several scenes of act 1. Dull routine at the breakfast table, in the office, and during the obligatory Sunday visits with the parents drain all the vitality from Larsen and his marriage. Cozy evenings are not cozy, and Sunday is exhausting, not a day of rest. Larsen is passive and without energy. He is no longer the same man whom Edith married, and she resolves at all costs to rediscover Larsen’s melody.

Act 2 shows the family rushing about seeking the melody, which is now represented by three elusive young girls, who are seen and heard by the audience but not by the characters. The search proceeds to the police, the church, and to caricatured representations of death and nature, with little success. Edith finally discovers the melody with a little girl skipping rope, Little Edith, presumably her youthful, uncorrupted self. She also encounters others who know the melody—a worker, a cyclist, and a soccer-playing scientist—and hurries to share her discovery with Larsen, who resolves to abandon his “nice” self and repossess the melody of life.

The final scenes have been faulted for being artificial and dramatically inconsistent with the rest of the play, but such an avant-garde production cannot be expected to follow the conventions of traditional dramatic structure. To be sure, there may be too many consecutive scenes in which characters search for the melody, but the greater problem is the clumsy insertion of social and political commentary—on war and peace, class struggle, and child rearing—which distracts from the story of Larsen’s fate. One comment by Little Edith—“You can bet it’s tough being a child”—leads directly to Abell’s next play, Eva aftjener sin barnepligt, a critique of traditional child-rearing practices, but it is out of place in The Melody That Got Lost.

Anna Sophie Hedvig

With the growing political and military menace in Europe, Abell turned his attention to the issue of totalitarianism and the citizen’s response to its dangers. In Judith, a drama inspired by Giraudoux’s play of the same name, Abell challenges the audience to deal with the tyrant Holofernes. In The Queen on Tour, the issue is free speech in the theater, and Silkeborg documents the courage and conflict of the resistance movement in occupied Denmark. Unquestionably, however, Abell’s most memorable play of this period was Anna Sophie Hedvig, which centers on a country schoolteacher who reveals at a family dinner party that she has murdered the evil colleague who was tyrannizing the school in the hope of becoming principal.

In many respects, Anna Sophie Hedvig is Abell’s simplest and most naturalistic play—its primary setting is the living room of a middle-class Copenhagen family—but even without resorting to the technical tricks of his earliest works, the playwright again produces innovative drama. He employs several devices—such as a power failure and a mysterious telegram—to heighten the suspense of the play, and much like the mystery novelist, he uses flashbacks to reveal key elements of the plot. These are accomplished by the stage equivalent of the cinematic cross-fade technique, the blending of one scene into another, changing sets by open curtain and a moment of darkness. The final scene of the play is something of a flash-forward of great dramatic effect. To the rising sound of drums, Anna Sophie Hedvig is symbolically executed with the doomed Spanish Republican rebel whose picture she had seen in the newspaper.

The unreal blending of time, place, and plot in this scene is typical of the play’s multileveled structure. The narrative frame overarching the play is a maid’s recounting of the previous night’s events to two young people, while the family dinner party, at which Anna Sophie Hedvig announces her crime, is the primary level of the plot. The party frames yet another level of action, two flashbacks to the school on the night of the murder.

This entire story line of Anna Sophie Hedvig and her Copenhagen relatives—their “little world”—is also juxtaposed with the political events of the “big world” outside, as represented by newspaper accounts of civil war in Spain, the menacing voice of Adolf Hitler on the radio, and the execution scene. In tying together the two worlds of the provincial teacher and European Fascism, Abell makes his point about the need to resist aggressors at whatever level they appear. Humankind, he suggests, not only has a right but also a duty to resist. In pushing Mrs. Møller down the long school staircase, Anna Sophie Hedvig was not only defending her own interests but also those of the colleagues and students who were cowed by the evil would-be principal.

The appearance of Anna Sophie Hedvig at the family’s dinner party is the catalyst for the political debate that assumes more of the drama as the mystery is unraveled. The discussion moves across a spectrum of political attitudes. The dinner guest Hoff, an arch capitalist, rejects involvement in unpleasant events, claiming that “an enlightened, cultivated modern man cannot kill!” The father and Karmach, two business associates of Hoff, are typically conservative bourgeois who are reluctant to discuss sensitive issues, especially when a business deal might suffer as a result. The father’s son, John, assumes the radical role at the other end of the political spectrum. As the playwright’s mouthpiece, he challenges the passivity and avarice of the businessmen and staunchly defends the premeditated act of Anna Sophie Hedvig. The behavior of John’s mother illustrates the intended result of Abell’s dramatic activism. At first, she tries to remain neutral, unwilling to offend her husband and his clients and repulsed at the idea of murder. Caught between the men’s view and that of her son, she soon realizes the necessity of taking a stand in the death struggle between good and evil and sides with John.

As with most of Abell’s works, the critical response to Anna Sophie Hedvig was not commensurate with the popular acclaim. Some reviewers found that such a forceful theme as the murder of tyrants was not well served by the suspenseful revelations of a multileveled murder mystery. Moreover, because most of the action—including the murder of Mrs. Møller—is told rather than shown, there is no direct connection between the little world of Anna Sophie Hedvig and the larger world of prewar Europe. Although it is clear that the playwright intends the teacher’s violent act to be symbolic of all resistance, he does appear to be endorsing a vigilante reaction that is far out of proportion to the provocation.

Performed in the wake of civil war, military takeovers, and unsuccessful appeasement policies, this play struck a responsive chord among Scandinavian audiences and provided a clear platform for the debates that raged in the late 1930’s. Yet just as the popularity of Anna Sophie Hedvig was assured by its treatment of these dynamic events, so its relevance to later generations is somewhat limited. Abell himself recognized this limitation in 1957, when, in a revival of the play, he altered the heroine’s final speech, omitting the Utopian references to “a time when it is wrong to kill—when no one will need to die for others or believe blindly without knowing.” Postwar experience had shown him that when one set of life’s problems is conquered, another arises. Still, Anna Sophie Hedvig is an interesting play whose basic premise, the citizen’s need for action in the face of tyranny, endures.

Postwar Plays

Abell’s postwar dramatic production was of two types: light revels in the art of the theater and fantastic yet serious encounters with the problem of human isolation and despair. The former group includes an incidental drawing room comedy, Miss Plinckby’s kabale (Miss Plinckby’s solitaire), and two festival plays, Ejendommen matr. nr. 267 østre kvarter (lot no. 267 east district), a tribute to the bicentennial of the Danish Royal Theater in 1948, and Andersen: Eller, Hans livs eventyr (Andersen: or, the fairy tale of his life), celebrating the one hundred and fiftieth birthday of Hans Christian Andersen in 1955.

The more serious plays of his last years all deal in imaginative ways with the same question: How can an individual in today’s world overcome fear, alienation, and despair, and does that person have a responsibility to lead others from death to life, from isolation to community? Days on a Cloud challenges the scientist who would work on awesome new weapons but refuse to get involved with decisions about their use. The title refers to the moments during which a scientist, contemplating suicide, decides whether to open his parachute. Vetsera blomstrer ikke for enhver (Vetsera does not bloom for everyone), only loosely based on the double suicide of Austria’s Crown Prince Rudolf and his mistress Maria Vetsera, also rejects suicide as an answer to life’s trials. Kameliadamen (the lady of the camellias) is an innovative version of the celebrated work by Alexandre Dumas, fils, and Skriget, Abell’s final work, is a multileveled, often obscure fantasy that revives many of the themes and motifs of his entire career.

Den blå pekingeser

The most prominent work of Abell’s last years is Den blå pekingeser, a theatrical tour de force that charmed his audiences and bewildered his critics. It is a lovely work with a rich blend of light, color, music, sound effects, and verbal and visual symbols, yet these many stimuli and the unconventional structure made it difficult for audiences to follow. The plot itself is reasonably simple, though its exposition is not. Tired of her egotistic, isolated existence, a young heiress, Tordis Eck, attempts suicide on the remote island where she has inherited an old villa. As she lingers between life and death, with a physician seeking to revive her, the spirits of persons from different time frames—past, present, and future—hover about her. With the intercession of others, her initial impulse to die yields to an affirmation of life and human fellowship.

The past in Den blå pekingeser is represented by the ghost of Isabella de Creuith, owner of the fanciful dog of the title and the deceased aunt who bequeathed Tordis both her villa and her lonely fate on the island of Iselø. The author uses these names to suggest the isolation and the cold (in Danish is means “ice”) which characterize and threaten human relationships: Tordis, Isabella, Iselø.) Present time includes Tordis’s crisis and the effort by her former lover, André (in Danish andre means “others”), to will her back to life, a psychic rescue directed from the café where he has learned of her suicide attempt. Thus space, as well as time, is dissolved in this exotic dream play. The future is represented by Esmond, the named but as yet unborn son of the lighthouse keeper’s wife. His reluctance to enter what he perceives as a hopeless existence prompts Tordis to tell him that life is indeed a gift to be cherished, and with that she wishes to reclaim her own life.

In addition to the three time frames that merge on the island, the play presents the plot from three dramatic perspectives with differing blends of action and dialogue. First, André’s activity in the café is dramatic action in the present, but there is no dialogue. Second, his narrative recollections of earlier encounters with Tordis are spoken in the past tense. Although they are monologues that represent his thoughts, they often replay past dialogues in his mind, and they entail no action. Finally, the fantastic realm in which past, present, and future meet on Iselø contains both action and dialogue.

Time is a major theme of this play, expressed not only in its creative structure but also in its story. There are numerous references to the fluid nature of time, in which a second is an eternity and a few years become a thousand. Time is also of the essence to the dying Tordis, as symbolized by the incessant turning of the lighthouse lamp. Only when she resolves to live does it stop, and with it the crisis of time.

As always with Abell, the theme of freedom is also prominent in the play. Yet while the playwright ultimately believes in humankind’s right to freedom from fear and loneliness, he also warns that freedom is not absolute. For Tordis, freedom had come to represent a retreat to Iselø and the refusal to commit herself to another person. Freedom was what she valued most, and it almost cost her her life. For Abell, as he says through André and Esmond, freedom is one’s life, and there is a responsibility to live it in fellowship with others.

Abell’s repeated assertions that life was not hopeless, that faith in human fellowship was not in vain, should be seen against a growing sense of apprehension and preoccupation with death in postwar Europe. There was tremendous disappointment that World War II had not resulted in a lasting peace but only in the division of the world into hostile camps armed with nuclear weapons. Pessimism also reigned in cultural affairs, in which alienation, angst, and the absurd were watchwords. It was Abell’s dream to neutralize such despair by uplifting his audience through the stimulation of their fantasy, but although he forcefully proclaimed his faith in humankind’s ability to overcome despair, his preoccupation with that theme in his last years created the impression that his faith was more a wish than a firm conviction.

Bibliography

Hye, Allen E. “Fantasy Plus Involvement Equals Thought: Kjeld Abell’s Conception of Theater.” Scandinavian Studies 63 (Winter, 1991): 30-49. An examination of the Scandinavian playwright’s view of theater.

Lingard, John. “Kjeld Abell.” In Twentieth Century Danish Writers, edited by Marianne Stecher-Hansen. Vol. 214 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: The Gale Group, 1999. A brief biography of Abell plus a listing of major works.

Marker, Frederick J. Kjeld Abell. Boston: Twayne, 1976. A basic but comprehensive study of Abell’s life and works.

Marker, Frederick J., and Lise-Lone Marker. “Playwriting in Transition” and “Three New Voices.” In A History of Scandinavian Theatre. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. A look at Abell from the perspective of the history of the theater in Scandinavia.