’The newly married couple’ made merry Shanghai
11/12/2009 //
The Shanghai Theatre Academy has in the last year very much focused on Norwegian plays. After the Ibsen play ‘Lady from the ocean’ was set up in June, ‘The Newly married couple’ by Norwegian author and playwriter Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson was put on stage the first half of December.
The play was met with wide interest by Chinese audience, and the mostly young actors received extensive acclaim for their performance.
Norwegian writer and Bjørnson scholar Edvard Hoem was invited by the academy to see the play, and enjoyed the Chinese interpretation of it very much, even though the Chinese dialogue proved a bit hard to understand.
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, one of the great literary sons of Norway, is perhaps most known for having written the words of the Norwegian national anthem. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1903, being one of three Norwegians having received the honor. The others would be, not Henrik Ibsen, but Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset, who was awarded the prize in respectively 1920 and 1928.