Alexander Mørk-Eidem

Biography

The Norwegian-Swedish stage director Alexander Mørk-Eidem studied at the National Academy of Theatre in Oslo. Subsequently, he has worked for a number of companies in Norway, most regularly, since 2000, at the National Theatre in Oslo, and also at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, the Stockholm City Theatre and the Royal Drama Theatre in the Swedish capital. He has staged plays by contemporary authors (Jon Fosse, Marius von Mayenburg, Tracy Letts, etc.), older classics (Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, etc.) and 20th-century dramatists (Pirandello, Williams, Miller, Pinter, etc.). He has also adapted novels (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Dumas, etc.). By shifting the time and space, he makes classic works more relevant and accessible to modern-time audiences. In his dramatization of Kipling’s The Jungle Book, he changed the Indian milieu, setting the story in a dystopian future Stockholm, with the animals taking control of Sergel Square. In his account of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the action is transferred from a Russian military outpost town in the early 20th century to Norrland in the 1960s and 70s, with the sisters not dreaming of going to Moscow, but to Stockholm. In the adaptation of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, the original 17th-century setting is shifted to the early 1980s and swords are replaced by electric guitars. Alexander Mørk-Eidem has also directed opera productions, including of Handel’s Orlando at the Komische Oper in Berlin (2010), Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (2015) and Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (2019) at the Norwegian Opera in Oslo. He is the holder of several coveted accolades, e.g. the Thaliapriset from Svenska Dagbladet (2009) and the En bit av Georgs hatt, awarded by Sweden’s Expressen daily (2011).