PRIVATE CONFESSIONS – The Playwright’s Word:

If this Bergman’s novel is to be defined with a single key motif, then it would be - confrontation.

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In the performance Private Confessions, the protagonist of the story, Anna Bergman, is facing her own choices and decisions, the consequences of the life in a grueling marriage, filled with difficulties, violence, guilt and suffering. Thus, the image of a traditional community is also a confrontation with one’s own history, past and identity.

Written as a novel, Private Confessions is structured in a way which quite successfully corresponds with the theatrical expression. Exciting, poetic and emotional, the five parts and the epilogue are like independent micro-plays, precisely arranged oppositions and extremely layered and complex relationships.

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Although it is a priestly family in the provinces of Sweden at the beginning of the 20th century, the Bergmans are a universal and timeless family. Through the aforementioned segments, by means of a mosaic, a delicate portrait of a woman is constructed, but also an image of recognizable generational conflicts, archetypal conflicts between spouses, parents and children.

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The Confessions are an intimate feeling about the past, an attempt to take a distant view of our personal situation in order to find a new perspective and interpretation of memories, no matter how painful it is. Anna Bergman’s encountering with the individuals who have defined and shaped her life (Jacob, the priest, Henrik, her husband, Karin, her mother, and her lover, Tomas) is at the same time her reminder of the courage, audacity and freedom she had eventually lost. Private Confessions examine the issue of the ability and strength of the individual to take control over one’s own life and to admit the mistakes which have been made. This story is a bitter awareness of the time lost, the missed opportunities, the conscious sacrificing and facing what we once were, what we could have been and what  we are.