Terje Vigen

Teaterkompaniet by Gard B. Eidsvold writes the following, among other things, about Terje Vigen (2015):

"Who are we, when it counts the most? How do we choose to act in meeting those who have been unjust towards us; who have degraded and humiliated us? Through simple adjustments for the stage, with original music, the production creates a strong meeting with a person who loses it all - and who, at the hour of revenge, chooses forgiveness.

As a ship pilot, Terje Vigen used all his adult life saving people at 'the furthermost reef there could be'. Within his being, he carries an eternally disturbed ocean after having lost his daughter and his wife. The attempt at saving them, through rowing to Denmark for life-saving food provisions, ended with five years in English imprisonment. When Terje Vigen later, in a fateful meeting, gets the chance to take revenge on the man who captured him, he lets it go. In one moment of clarity he forgives the culprit who took it all away from him. In the same moment, he also forgives himself. A miracle for Terje Vigen and for humanity.

But isn't it human to yearn for revenge? How can one, in practice, forgive the unforgivable? Can everything be forgiven? In all of us, at all layers of society, the aspect of forgiveness exists. It is significant in the building of local, national and global values. In raising awareness of the theme, the spotlight is on what may heal and strengthen the bonds of community - without religious demands. The human being is the one who acts, chooses and defines the surrounding world.

Through making the psychological content of the poem Terje Vigen a theme, a universal problem is illuminated - while adding clarity to and reducing the taboos of the darker sides of the human being; those sides that tend to surface in us when we go through major or minor crises.

Terje Vigen is also so much more; it is our cultural history and our heritage - and it is a poem filled with hope and love. And if there is anything that has defined us as a people, it must be the ocean; the ocean we harvest from, as well as the ocean that makes demands on us, the ocean we carry within us - and the ocean we are all part of, the great ocean of humanity."

SOURCES:

Teaterkompaniet by Gard B. Eidsvold, via the webpage of Kulturkirken Jakob (Jakob Culture Church), 01.11.2016, http://jakob.no/program/arkiv/2016/05/terje-vigen/

The National Theatre on Terje Vigen (2002), www.nationaltheatret.no, 01.11.2016, http://forest.nationaltheatret.no/Productions/EventSeries/2b974343-b0a8-4b58-ae82-9b80a6c98092?event_id=fd33c639-1f4f-4ed7-8d17-0cf9015f491b