This study deals with Ingmar Bergman’s stage productions of Ibsen’s plays. Ingmar Bergman is well known for having created a new way of interpreting Ibsen in Sweden. The aim of this dissertation is to show how he invented a new manner of presenting Ibsen on stage, but at the same time how his productions are definitely bound to the previous theatre tradition.

In his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, Bergman himself declares who he considers as his masters: Olof Molander, Alf Sjöberg, Torsten Hammarén.

Consequently the research has been structured in order to discover the elements which possibly Bergman has borrowed from his masters and how he has used them in his performances. The attention has been prevalently focused on the way he has reinvented them so as to adapt them to his own directorial style.

This dissertation deals also with another director, Hans Jacob Nilsen, whom Bergman remembers in an interview. An attempt was made to discover whether Nilsen’s production of Peer Gynt has influenced somehow Bergman’s productions.

Furthermore, this dissertation is an attempt to define which elements characterize bergmanian ibsenism by underlining their presence in a shakespearian production of Bergman, The Winter’s Tale, and also to investigate whether Ibsen productions by Ingmar Bergman have left a trace in the generation of the directors working at the present time at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.