cultural resources in henrik ibsen's early environment - Ibsen.net

V. Erik Bøgh. A travelling theatre company.
This is a memoir by a Danish writer of a season he spent in Sweden in the 1840's as an
actor in one of the travelling theatrical companies that in earlier years had visited Skien.
Despite the fact that some readers might find several of the incidents offensive, the essay
is included because it offers a rare glimpse of the production conditions in these
companies. Several of the persons mentioned in the piece, especially the two directors,
were well-known characters in Skien during Ibsen's boyhood, because their company was
in residence at several different times. The wife of one of them reportedly once gave
dancing lessons in Skien after the company had temporarily dissolved.
"Et reisende skuespillerselskab," Erindringer fra mine unge Dage. Erik Bøgh
(København: 1894): 303 ff.
What especially attracted me to the company was its plan: to travel in Sweden.
That gave me the hope that I could rid myself of the clumsiness which every novice
usually brings to the theatre, without the Danish public's suffering from it, so that,
perhaps as soon as the next year, I could appear on this side of the Sound (i.e., the Danish
side) with the proper skill.
After what I had heard about the company's management and talents, I had no
reason to desire or expect any long-standing relationship with it. The fact that the season
would be spent outside our own country aroused a suspicion that its personnel were not
fit take part in a competition with the provincial companies who remained at home, but
that did not worry me, since I fancied that the less well the others could perform, the
greater prospects must there be for me. However, the information which I collected about
its two directors did not sound especially comforting. It was said about the first, the
rather well-known J.P. Miller, that he had been implicated in an affair, in its time
much-discussed, but hushed up by persons in high places, concerning some degenerate
social gatherings in a building adjoining the theatre. He had incurred from that a
Consilium abeundi, with the consequence that he travelled to Norway. There he debuted
at the Christiania Theatre, made a fiasco, took up journalism, and once again came into
conflict with the police, partly on the grounds of a brawl, during which in self-defense he
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