Directing

“Ibsendramat är det moderna dramats Rom: alla vägar leda dit och därifrån.”

“What is remarkable is the fluid choreography that Tveit [Mikkelsen] has brought to the play. Within a constricted space, the six actors manage to suggest the picture of the house by the fjord, the jetty and the horror of the drowned Eyolf’s eyes staring out from under the water.”

“Terje Tveit [Terje J. Mikkelsen], with a perception which give his unconventional Ibsen revivals the revelatory power director Stephen Daldry brought to J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. All the time the surface takes you away from what’s expected, the production draws you to the play’s heart.”

“ … Ibsen Stage Company is a wildcard of Ibsen productions and Recording reveals Hedda anew. There are so many productions that audiences have reached a point where experiment, wisely done, brings freshness and new insights. As does Terje Tveit, with a perception which give his unconventional Ibsen revivals the revelatory power director Stephen Daldry brought to J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. All the time the surface takes you away from what’s expected, the production draws you to the play’s heart. Many more flashy directors have had much bigger budgets and said far less.Previous Tveit productions have involved vivid imagery and pace. The pace is still here but with one overall image, a radio-studio where a modern cast is recording Hedda Gabler. The concentration when they speak into microphones is contrasted by the hurry as cast and crew rush in and out as events parallel the night Hedda attempts to influence magnetic artist Eilert Løvborg (here Ebbie) and succeeds only in destroying his work. Famously, Hedda becomes an irrelevance and disposes of herself as others control her or repair the damage she’s done. So does G, the scornfully furious actress playing her – whom Sarah Head gives a flame-haired intensity; her eyes pierce with suppressed hate as she speaks to fellow actor Debbie over their scripts. Kaja Bjørntvedt’ score pulses and waves with conventional insistence beneath much of the action, which goes far beyond mere paralleling to re-ignite the passions easily lost in the respectability of a conventional revival. And the modern techno-solution to the dead Ebbie’s lost work not only fits his experimental multi-media style entirely bur provides direct evidence of how G manipulates others. It’s final rebelatory moments in a production which holds the attention of an audience seated in a circle round the central action for tow rapid hours. […]

“In Ibsen Stage Company’s stripped-down adaptation directed by Terje Tveit [Terje J. Mikkelsen], the moments of high drama and conflict are handled with gripping sureness of touch and paced with wonderful precision. … you can feel the zig-zags of electricity on stage.”

“It’s a testament to the skills of both the cast and the director that in this staging the characters are never anything but three-dimensional. This is a must-see production.”

“A stylized and dramatic doll’s house. ... The realism both in gesticulation, facial expression and way of speaking is gone. ... Terje Tveit [Terje J. Mikkelsen] and Ibsen Stage Company take on making A Doll’s House unreal and nightmarish is a fruitful idea bringing out interesting aspects in the text. ... Stylized and anti-realistic - a theatrical nightmare at Christmas.”

“Ibsen’s dramatic poem, which at one point he doubted could be staged, is a gift for the imagination. Yet in Terje Tveit’s [Terje J. Mikkelsen] expressionistic concept, Peer Gynt Recharged at the Riverside Studios this doubt is shredded.”

"Ibsen’s dramatic poem, which at one point he doubted could be staged, is a gift for the imagination. Yet in Terje Tveit’s [Terje J. Mikkelsen] expressionistic concept, Peer Gynt Recharged at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, this doubt is shredded. (…) The groupings and tableau present breath taking visions of hell and suffering. The ensemble company of fifteen adapt well to the episodic, almost filmic, style.”

“This latter day Ibsen play hasn’t been given the big West End treatment yet but on tonight‘s evidence perhaps a swift transfer is in order.”

“Fjord fiesta: Ibsen given an enjoyable restaging. ... As written, the play has only six characters, but a seventh - Rosmer’s dead wife, Beate - stalks the central protagonists in Terje Tveit’s [Terje J. Mikkelsen] bold, expressionistic staging, literalising the theme of the hold of the dead over the living. Turbulent, dissonant violins swirl and underscore the rapturously delivered dialogue with its recurrent feverish talk of white horses.”

Critics Choice - Five Best Plays Nationwide

“Terje Tveit’s [Terje J. Mikkelsen] accomplished adaptation gives as much weight and emotional urgency as they must have had in 1877. Part of the success relies on the way the large cast is marshalled around the small stage, creating a powerful sense of provincial claustrophobia.”

“A synopsis of the original runs to the length of a sizeable short story, which means that translator, adaptor and director Terje Tveit [Terje J. Mikkelsen] deserves credit for wrestling this down to manageable size. ... undoubtedly sexier than most fringe productions.”

“The fringe is often accused of feeling limited – in scope, ambition and size. The Nightingale Mystery certainly cannot be accused of that. The production, which is as slick as it is visually striking, boasts a large cast, a sprawling plot and countless locations ... Visually, the piece is distinctive – a trademark of director Terje Tveit [Terje J. Mikkelsen], and in pace, the piece speeds along. ... The sheen on this production is undeniable.”

"It may be that in 2003 Ibsen’s intentions in Little Eyolf can be more faithfully re-created in the theatre by non-naturalistic staging. This was forcibly brought home to me earlier this year by Ibsen Stage Company (…)  Ibsen’s text was all there, in a faithful translation into English by Terje Tveit [Terje J. Mikkelsen], who had also directed; but the set was bare but for a few permanent props: a suitcase out of which spilled the blank leaves of Alfred Allmers’ unwritten book on Human Responsibility; a bench on which characters confronted each other; a flagpole round which they moved, their body language suggesting at times the same despair as those sentences which have nowhere to go but a dash, at other times a glimmer of purpose and hope. The actor who played Little Eyolf was an adult, and so attracted none of the extra-textual sympathy usually given to the child actor as such. Taller than any other member of the cast, six foot and more, he spoke the child’s lines through the crutch he held up. Less important in his own right than as an object of displacement and guilt, he stayed on stage (as did the Rat Wife) throughout the three Acts, a personified conscience. And the ending left us powerfully torn between believing and not believing that Rita and Allmers had a future other than emptiness and death. Here was a creative translation which had started from a faithful reading of Ibsen’s signs and had gone on to ask how these signs could be made to speak to a contemporary audience. And by ‘speak to’ here I don‘t mean suspend disbelief, but move, alert, harrow, disturb. That is, activate what James called ‘the hard compulsion’ of Ibsen’s art."