Rosmersholm

The Hedda Jury gave the following reason for the award to Eirik Stubø:

"During the span of a few years this year's winner has managed to bring a number of fruitful and exciting impulses into Norwegian theatre, not least because he in an untypical manner for a Norwegian has a consciously intellectual approach to the art of the stage. He addresses the secrets existing in every text, to release them and convey them to the audience.He is an excellent instructor of actor and he has developed a stage expression of his own.

As the true representative of director's theatre he is, he has emphasised sensitive, daring modernisation the classics, and he has succeeded. Eirik Stubø gets this year's best direction award for a minimalist, innovative and complete new reading of a classic, an unusually clear and intense interpretation of Rosmersholm at The National Theatre."

The Hedda Jury gave the following reason for the award to Ellen Ruge:

"For almost ten years the winner of the year has made her totally distinct mark on a number of very different, but always meaningful productions. Not only because she uses her medium in a sparing manner, creating rooms and landscapes, while triggering the imagination, but also because she finely tuned and intuitively takes part in creating a narrative, with and beside the text she is to illuminate. Paradoxically she also masters the dark, the lack of light, to the full.

Her talent is so diverse and original that her efforts in the performance becomes an independent work of art, while she expands as well as adds precision to the director's as well as the stage designer's intentions. The award for best lighting design goes to Ellen Rugefor her part of the interpretation of Rosmersholm at The National Theatre."

Liv Riiser said the following, among other things, in her speech for Eirik Stubø, held during the awards ceremony for Norwegian Critics' Award for theatre 2008/2009, September 3 2009 in House of Literature, Oslo:

"This year's Norwegian Critics' Award for theatre goes to a director who to an increasing degree has cultivated the corporal presence of actors onstage, for two productions which - despite their tragic content - have lifted us so that we can still feel it in our bodies. I am talking about Eirik Stubø, and the productions of Ibsen's Rosmersholm at The National Theatre's main stage during The Ibsen Festival 2008, and about Racine's Andromache in a version by Jon Fosse, at The Norwegian Theatre's Scene 2 the spring of 2009. At both occasions the performances are held in measured, minimalist expression, contributing to the violent pressure the texts room."

You may read the speech in full (Norwegian only) here.

SOURCES:

The National Theatre, http://fdb.nationaltheatret.no/S%C3%B8k/tabid/57/ctl/PlayView/mid/374/oppsetningId/c21d41e0-9700-4c13-a16d-b080e3e97ecb/Default.aspx

Sceneweb on The Hedda Award, http://www.sceneweb.no/en/awarding/17951/The_Hedda_Award_2009-2009

Norwegian Critics' Association, kritikerlaget.no, 29.09.2011, http://www.kritikerlaget.no/pages/nor/411-regissoer_eirik_stuboe_fikk_kritikerprisen