Denmark is pushing the boat out for Hans Christian Andersen's bicentenary. We could learn from it, reports Belinda McKeon
Strange, when you think about it, that it has taken until now for Robert Lepage, Quebecois conjurer of theatrical marvel, chemist of fantasy and folklore, of aspiration and awe, to turn his imaginative eye towards Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish writer who mixed the same potent elements in his fairy tales, plays and novels, to haunting, sometimes disturbing effect. The floating spacewalker of Lepage's The Far Side Of The Moon and the robot insects of his Zulu Time occupy the same spellbound space inhabited by Andersen's ugly duckling, his princess on her pea, his little matchstick girl.
Yet it wasn't until Lars Seeberg, secretary general of the eight-month festival planned for Andersen's bicentenary in Denmark next year, approached Lepage with the idea of taking the author as inspiration for a solo show that he began to feel the connection. Familiar only, as most of us are, with the better-known fairy tales, he began to delve deeper into Andersen's enormous oeuvre - his tales for adults, his prose arabesques, his travel sketches - and discovered the hook he was looking for. Like Andersen himself, the central character of the tale The Dryad, a female spirit who inhabits a tree, was drawn towards the Paris world exhibition, opened by Napoleon in 1867. "And 1867," says Lepage, "was the birth of Canada. And exactly 100 years later, in Montreal, was the world exhibition for my generation."
The idea of Andersen journeying around Europe, still chasing his identity at 62, and fascinated by the synthesis of technology and art on display in Paris, was enough to secure Lepage's interest; one final ingredient and the die was cast. "He was also very personally repressed, and he was fascinated by the world of prostitution in Paris," says Lepage. "So the show will be about his loneliness and about that theme of ugliness which is everywhere in his work.
"It will also be about the ambiguity of his sexuality, without it being a big, spectacular theme, but it will be there."
Lepage is still, by his own admission, experimenting with the many ideas he has for the Andersen show - a Canadian musician invited to the Paris opera, a troubled dog much like the director's own pet ("I brought him to the dog psychoanalyst; it cost me a lot of money to be told what my own problems were," he laughs) - but so excited by his involvement are the members of HCA2005, the foundation set up to organise next year's mammoth celebration, that they have already honoured him with this year's Hans Christian Andersen Award.
Which might sound merely cute until you sit in on the lavish two-hour prize-giving ceremony in Andersen's home city of Odense, some 100 miles east of Copenhagen, and hear the heartfelt speeches of the new Hans Christian Andersen ambassadors - several culturally inclined individuals from around the world, chosen to spread the word about the author in their countries - and watch as an honorary HCA award is bestowed on a smiling Queen Margrethe of Denmark, as well as on an Italian translator and a Brazilian professor of literature. All three are being rewarded for their work in bringing Andersen to a wider audience - the queen, a recognised painter and costume designer, for her work on stage versions of Andersen's tales. After their speeches, and some Andersen-themed musical interludes, comes Lepage's moment - and his €50,000 prize cheque.
It's a big event - and believe it or not it is annual. On April 2nd each year, Andersen's birthday, the Danish intelligentsia pour in to the Odense Theatre to applaud him - at length and at significant expense. In Denmark they take their cultural icons very seriously, and it's interesting to compare the explosion of activities that will take place there, and beyond, from April 2nd next year with the events in Ireland for this year's Bloomsday centenary. Two hundred years on, of course, copyright restrictions don't exist to narrow the scope of projects on Andersen, but the imaginative and financial investments in HCA2005 far exceed anything planned for the Joycean occasion.
Operas, plays, dance works and even a symphony have been commissioned, along with extensive new translations of Andersen's work; a major exhibition at the Danish National Gallery will explore the author's time in Rome through the paintings of the artists he knew there; there will be two film festivals and a series of television documentaries; programmes will run in schools, seminars will be sponsored in universities; some of Andersen's former homes, from his tiny birthplace in Odense to his even tinier bedsit in Copenhagen, will be opened to the public as museums. In all the investment nears €35 million, €10 million of which constitutes the single biggest private donation ever made to a European cultural event, from the Danish Bikuben Foundation.
That's quite a birthday party.
It doesn't seem outlandish to Peter Bentzon, executive secretary of the Royal Theatre, in Copenhagen, where most of the main commissioned pieces, including Lepage's solo show, will run next year, but then he and his colleagues are growing accustomed to generous investment. The 256-year-old institution, which houses four art forms - theatre, music, opera and ballet - currently operates three stages, the oldest of which, built in 1874, is still the least problematic; high, cavernous and ornate, it shows off Alexei Ratmansky's ballet of Anna Karenina to stunning effect during my visit. But an orchestra pit on the narrow side makes it less suitable for opera, while the 1930 drama stage, referred to as the New Stage, still suffers from the technical and acoustic limitations that persuaded the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, its original intended recipient, to flee it in the 1930s, prompting the government to install the Royal there instead.
The quest for a more suitable theatrical space has been on the agenda ever since, says Bentzon. Proposals to build a new playhouse were rejected by the governments of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s; the final drive reached the stage of an international architectural competition, and the selection of a winning design, before being shelved once again by Copenhagen city council.
But the Royal's luck changed at the end of the 1990s, in the form of a gift to the Danish state from its richest citizen, the shipping magnate Maersk McKinney Møller: a spectacular new opera and ballet house, which is being built, facing the royal palace, on Copenhagen's waterfront. Worth about 1.5 billion Danish kroner (€200 million), the six-stage, 2,000-seat facility will open in January with a new production of Verdi's Aida, with Strauss's Elektra, Handel's Giulio Cesare and Wagner's Siegfried to follow. In all 150 extra performances a year will be staged in the new opera house, which will supplement rather than replace the existing stages. Audience figures should rise, says Bentzon, "from the present 450,000 per year to 600,000".
It's most likely to be on its stage that most of next year's Andersen-themed productions will appear. The US choreographer John Neumeier's ballet of The Little Mermaid will open in April; The Secret Arias, a new chamber opera by Elvis Costello, will explore Andersen's infatuation with the Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind. Along with Lepage, Arc Dance Company, the Australian Ballet and the Spanish company Teatro de los Sentidos, headed by the Colombian director Enrique Vargas, are scheduled to visit as part of the Andersen celebrations.
And there's more: compared with the to-move-or-not-to-move predicament of Ireland's national theatre, to which birthday celebrations have failed to make a whit of difference, the Royal Theatre's fortunes begin to read like one of Andersen's cheerier fairy tales. Buoyed by the gift of the opera house, the Danish ministry of culture in 1999 secured government support for the construction of a much-needed new playhouse.
In 2002 it emerged that the 337 architectural proposals for the new theatre had not, six months in to the competition, even been opened, and the project began to look like an abandoned pre-election promise by a conservative government that would prefer to save the 800 million kroner (€108 million) needed for the project. But the process soon reopened, and a scale model of the winning design, by the Danish team of Boje Lundgaard and Lene Tranberg, now sits proudly in the lobby of the Royal.
The funding, from the ministry of culture, the city of Copenhagen and business sponsors, is all in order, says Bentzon; four-year agreements with the government, in place since 1992, help to keep matters on course, and the playhouse, dramatically set over the water opposite the opera house, in what Bentzon calls its "perfect, perfect" central location, is due to open in 2008.
So is a dockside berth a good move for a national theatre, I ask, thinking of the Abbey's recent disappointment - news of Daniel Libeskind's performing-arts centre at Grand Canal Dock has not yet broken. But Bentzon's reply has as much relevance for Dublin Docklands Development Authority as it has salt for the wounds of the Abbey: a waterfront location cannot be beaten, done right.
"Two conditions," he warns. "It mustn't be isolated. If the docklands means nothing but office buildings, and is completely empty in the evenings, and so on, that's no good. Our opera house is a little cut off, on the other side of the harbour, and it will take effort to get there, but we are lucky in that it is surrounded by creative places: a film school, a drama school and an architecture school are all nearby." Students from these institutions, he hopes, will feed in to the opera house and sustain its imaginative energy well past the initial high of the opening year and the Andersen festival.
"And, secondly, transport. We are providing shuttle buses from the metro station and by boat. People have to feel they can just drop by, see a show or just have a coffee. It has to be just part of their city." Little Mermaid move over: Copenhagen's waterfront is set to host a livelier tribute to Denmark's most famous son.
