Director: Mari Kjeldstadli
Set and Costume Design: Katrin Bombe
Composer and Sound Design: Guro Skumsnes Moe
Lighting Design: Laurent Ravot
“I can’t just stand here and be Eyolf’s mother. Just that. Nothing more. I won’t, I tell you! I can’t! […] No, that’s not for me. I was meant to be the child’s mother. But not to be a mother to him. You’ll have to accept me as I am, Alfred.”
Rita Allmers, Little Eyolf
Kilden Theater’s main production this fall is perhaps Ibsen’s most beautiful and painful play, and it tackles one of our very last taboos: a mother’s admission that motherhood was not what she wanted.
In the play, we meet the married couple Rita and Alfred and their son Eyolf. Eyolf has a disability caused by his parents’ carelessness when he was an infant. Shame and guilt gnaw at the parents, but they still cannot bring themselves to see their own child. Then the real catastrophe strikes.
Director Mari Kjeldstadli is back, staging her third Ibsen production at Kilden following the great success of *Rosmersholm* in 2022 and *Ghosts* in 2025. Kjeldstadli says of the play: “For me, human responsibility is central—the question of whether we can afford to go through life living only for ourselves. What do we lose in our relationships with others, and what do we lose as a society?”
