Night nestles around the crowded bus that snakes us from grassy country slopes via copses and neon-lit suburbs to Aarhus town centre. Standing teenagers sway; beer sloshes the sides of a plastic glass. A rhythmic chant in English patterns through the Danish conversational hum of men, women and children returning from the 1,000-year past of a Viking epic to the present. Two among the teenagers are quietly singing-speaking a rap number. They stand face to face, seeming to search one another’s eyes for the words they enunciate so carefully in a language whose shapes are unfamiliar to their lips, which move exaggeratedly to form them. The moment is small, and nothing to do with the performance we have just seen, yet it seems to crystallise the evening and something bigger: people sharing experiences that help them shape and reshape their realities. It is such experiences that the European Union project of cities of culture aims to multiply and amplify.
This year, Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, is one of Europe’s two capitals of culture (alongside Paphos, in Cyprus). Its theme is “Rethink: Think the new, think anew, think again”, and its 360-odd planned events involve local communities, national companies and international co-operations. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given Anglo-Danish links stretching back to Viking incursions, there is a sizable English presence in the programme, with work shown here as well as there: the Royal Opera House, the Manchester international festival (which has two productions in the schedule) and the UK’s own City of Culture, Hull. For this last, the theatre company Blast Theory will deploy a mix of technology, social media and audience interactions to explore what life might be like in the year 2097 in a future city imagined as a blend of Aarhus and Hull (where evidence of centuries-back Danish-Yorkshire blending is found in the names of surrounding villages). Notions of boundaries crossed carry over into the international children’s literature festival, co-produced with the Hay festival; for this, 39 authors under the age of 40 will create new works around the theme of “journey”.
Our bus journeys have taken us to and from Aarhus’s extraordinary Moesgaard Museum, whose grass roofs and glass walls cover time-travelling exhibitions to ancient pasts. Here is the world’s best preserved bog body, an iron age man; looking on his face, millennia are as transparent as the glass between us. Here, animation recreates the clash and roar of a battle fought in 205AD. Here, a Viking village comes to life and Viking voyages are retraced. Outside the museum, in recent days, a new exhibit has been erected. Huge, massy, made of wood, from some angles it looks like a ruined Viking longboat lying on its side; from others, like the stretched-open, tooth-jagged jaws of a longship’s dragon figurehead. Rising before it are tiers of seats, enough to fit 3,500 people. This is the set designed by Eilev Skinnarmo for Røde Orm.
Røde Orm (the Red Serpent) is the sword-wielding, hypochondriac hero of the eponymous novel by Swedish author Frans G Bengtsson. Orm’s journeys take him to France, Spain, Ireland and England; along the rivers Dvina and Dnieper to the Black Sea in the years between 980 and 1010. The novel’s English translation, The Long Ships, was described by the late, great Philip French in these pages as a “wonderful adventure” and praised by him for its “mordant, quirky, melancholic” sense of humour (of the 1964 film of the book, he said simply, “it turned out badly”).
Henrik Szklany’s new stage adaptation maximises the fiction’s humour and minimises the mileage. Gone, for instance, are Orm’s years in the imperial bodyguard at Córdoba and conversion to Muslim practice. Instead, the action opens with Orm and his men sailing their longboat back from Ireland (a miniature longship sails on to the forestage). They are bearing a bell and a captive monk (dragged through blue-umbrella waves) as two prizes to be presented at the court of Harald Bluetooth, King of the Danes (round as a balloon and roaring with toothache).
Here, Orm falls in love with the princess Ylva (who enters haughtily, astride a fine, grey horse) and falls foul of her wicked brother, Sven (his evil “ha, ha, ha” laugh is melodramatically villainous). Separated from Ylva, Orm sails to England where he wins the Battle of Maldon (much clashing of swords and tumult of extras) and the hand of Ylva, who has been transported to the court of Ethelred the Unready; the pair convert to Christianity and are married. Complexities thus excised, concertinaing of events gives the plot a clear dramatic drive, easily followed even by a non-Danish speaker (easier still if a suggested English synopsis materialises).
The cast of the Royal Danish theatre, assisted by volunteer extras, under the direction of Frede Gulbrandsen, are as much larger than life as anyone could wish a company of Vikings to be. The emphasis is on action and broad humour. Exaggerations are carried to the point of pantomime-style parody and, in the case of the portrayal of the glam-rock, boogieing English court, taken way beyond. We cannot complain: the big-bosomed ladies who breastfeed the adult, silver-suited Ethelred, seem inspired by our own Benny Hill and David Walliams; their mass exit, pursued by (a randy) bear possibly a sly nod towards Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Characterisations are broad-stroke, vivid and engaging. There are surprises: Andreas Jebro’s Orm stands to one side and lets Christine Gjerulff’s Ylva (princess glamorous with flowing hair and frock, set off with an “I’ll take no nonsense from any of you chaps” attitude) deliver her own swashbuckling comeuppance to the baddie who captured her. There are also moments of stunning visual poetry: children frolicking under the setting sun on the rooftop lawns of the museum beyond the bed where Orm and Ylva dream of a family; the English army arriving on the distant top of the same lawns, fiery brands blazing against the newly night-blanketed sky.
With its simple plot and outsize characters, Røde Orm gently pokes fun at stereotypes and offers its audiences a chance to rethink, perhaps what it means to be Danish, but certainly what it means to be a hero/ine.
