“Elling” is based on the bestselling novel “Elling, Brødre I Blodet” (Blood Brothers) by Ingvar Ambjørnsen. The story is about the mismatched pair Elling and his room mate Kjell Bjarne, who have been discharged from a psychiatric hospital and given an apartment in Oslo in an attempt to allow them to live a normal life. The humorous and warm play was adapted to film by the director Petter Næss. The film received an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language movie in 2002. Ingvar Ambjørnsen has also written several other novels about the “Elling”- character.
“Little Eyolf” was written in 1894 by the famous Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The play, which is among Ibsen’s last plays, is a family drama taking place in the course of a day and a half at the home of Rita and Alfred Allmers, near the fjord and some distance from the nearest town. They have a partly paralyzed son of nine, Eyolf, whose handicap is the result of a fall in babyhood due to the parents’ momentary neglect. The parents are haunted by guilt, and the plot develops as an old woman famous for luring rats into the sea arrives at the house and asks whether there is anything "gnawing" there. The play’s multifaceted thematic structure touches upon a man’s attraction towards what he believes to be his own sister, a mother’s jealousy of her own child, and the way adults sometimes sacrifice children at the altar of egoism.
For programme schedule, please visit the Habima theater’s website.