Johan Hilton: Warning for a really spine-chilling our on the Swedish scenes

The violent popular theatre of the Grand Guignol in Paris had a special focus: skräckmelodramer. Around the turn of the last century, at least seven decades before the splatter was even a concept, even the blood and body parts of the ears of the audience. The theatre's leading lady Paula Maxa was doing to and with known as the world's most assassinated woman. When she rounded off her career in the 1930s, she had been taken by daga over 10,000 times on at least 60 different ways.

As skräckentusiast I have always wanted to see a real Grand Guignol show, but unfortunately hit the theatre again in 1962. Movies like ”Psycho” had paved the way for a new kind of skräckkultur and reduced the demand on the macabre scenmelodramer. The future was celluloid.

mistake. As most theatergoers know, there is nothing to measure themselves against the concentration as in the reference moment occurs in the physical meeting between stage and audience. In particular not when it comes to our most secret horrors.

Some would even say that fear represents one of teaterkonstens basic principles. The concept of ”fear and pity” was coined already by the dramaturgins father Aristotle and pertained to the desirable condition that the audience would be brought in during a tragedy.

when king Oedipus, in the worst gore-style, poking out their own eyes. Or why not when the latter-day playwrights such as Sarah Kane bares mankind's most abominable pages of the 1990s ”In-yer-face”-drama? A genre that, incidentally, does not have so little in common with the Grand Guignols skräckpjäsers a taste for the extreme.

trendkonjunkturerna than once to turn and to Paristeatern again to hoist the curtain can skräckälskaren until further try and satisfy their fill at the Swedish theaters. Where would you otherwise turn to in these times, when any news broadcast is similar to something out of a paranoid 50-talsrysare: repealed kärnvapenavtal, gigantic holes in Antarctic and climate change which fundamentally alters the conditions for our existence?

In our revels, consequently, a carnivorous plant in the greedy floristers blood at the Gothenburg city theatre, Malmö city theatre, flock vampires, and at Folkoperan in Stockholm is the family Usher is a oblitt fate in a fiendish doctor's influence. Not to mention the faceless bureaucratic threat in Franz Kafkas ”the Process” that has now become a ballet.

of Course, you can read about them all in 2019, the year the first edition of the scenbilagan. The warning for a really spine-chilling scenkonstvår is hereby issued.