Sven-Hugo Persson, a longtime employee of SR’s cultural editorial staff, remembers the actor Sven Wollter.
The first time I saw Sven Wollter was like Gusten in the TV series Hemsöborna after Strindberg’s novel, which large parts of the Swedish people followed, in the only black and white channel in 1966. Ten years later in 1976 came another TV series: Raskens, after Vilhelm Moberg’s novel . Five million Swedes are said to have seen it and Sven had an emphatic breakthrough.
It was TV and film that made him well known, close to popular. But now I still want to remember his efforts as a theater actor. When I was in my twenties, it was 1968 and I saw almost everything at Gothenburg City Theater. The theater, which for a few years was considered a leader in Sweden. Radical renewal was on the agenda. And the opponents invented the nickname Beijing Opera.
Sven Wollter, who came to the theater at this time, became one with that development and became one of the ensemble’s strong profiles. Director Ralf Långbacka, a specialist in Brecht and Chekhov, came from Finland and set up Brecht’s Mr Puntila and his servant Matti. And who would play the talented and rebellious boy if not Sven Wollter. The set was a great success.
Sven Wollter could still be in that role, virile rebel.
But he wanted to expand his register. And he did so with information when he surprised as the king in Lennart Hjulström’s brilliant set of Strindberg’s Gustav III. Crunching “r” and refined gestures, a theatrical and cat-flexible power player. He played the role quite convincingly and was still unmistakably Wollter, not least thanks to the raspy, hoarse and really completely impossible voice.
He maintained his political commitment, the wall fell and the dictatorships of Eastern Europe disappeared, but he maintained his blind faith in the old rigid, almost Stalinist communism – a bizarre departure from an otherwise talented and versatile artist.
When I met him I was struck mainly by his enormous energy, his vitality, it was as if he could do more than others. He was, of course, part of the group that started the suburban project Angereds Teater in Gothenburg, as well as in the ensemble in the newly started Folkteatern in Gävle.
He directed and sang records, made soup theater, radio programs and wrote novels towards the end of his life. And he was the only one from an institutional theater who was part of the free groups’ Tent Project, which toured the country and kingdom around 1977.
He did many film roles, he worked with directors like Widerberg and Tarkovski. Now I remember above all his efforts as an everyday and cohesive policeman in Widerberg’s Man on the Roof.
And at Stockholm City Theater he did Cyrano de Bergerac in Johan Bergenstråhle’s set in the 80’s. His then partner in real life, Viveka Seldahl played his beloved Roxane. Sven was of course brilliant in the kind of parade that requires bravado and charisma, technical skill and at the same time the open vulnerability that could make an audience get caught and suffer from the realization of the power of love and the shortness of life, when the game ended, our hero died and the autumn leaves covered the stage floor.