In conversation with director Eline Arbo about The Copenhagen Trilogy
"Her writing and that ambition have to be like a beating heart beneath the whole production."
With rehearsals for The Copenhagen Trilogy in full swing, there is still plenty of searching, refining, and cutting going on. For director Eline Arbo, the appeal of Tove Ditlevsen lies not only in her life story, but above all in her contradictions. We spoke with her about why it is precisely that complexity that inspires her, how she explores the boundary between fiction and reality, and what, in her view, still makes Tove Ditlevsen so relevant today.
9 October 2026
Written by: Iris Istha
How did you first come into contact with the work of Tove Ditlevsen?
“I actually got to know Tove Ditlevsen's work through my mother. She's a huge fan. So I read her books, her poems, we had them all at home. I reread the trilogy as a whole when it came out, about six years ago, when it was getting a kind of renaissance worldwide and was being translated into lots of languages. At first, of course, they were three separate books; then it was published as one trilogy. I had read it before, a very long time ago, but when I reread it I thought: this is fantastic material. This is theatre. Let's go.”
What makes Ditlevsen's life and work so well suited to the stage, for you?
"For me, it's first and foremost about Tove Ditlevsen as a character; a very complex character. She's very contradictory as a person, and that makes her an interesting protagonist for a story. She desperately wants to become a writer, she has a lot of ambition, she's boundless, radical, and in a certain sense also destructive, including toward the people around her. And at the same time, she's someone who wants a husband, a house, and children, who very much wants to fit within the ideal picture of what a life, a woman's life, should be. So she actually wants everything at once, which turns out not to be possible for her.
On top of that, it's her own memories that she's telling about. She herself doesn't call the books autobiographies, but memories. She constantly plays with fiction and reality: what's real, what's not real, did this really happen, were the people she describes really like that? That play between fiction and reality is also very interesting theatrically. In my own productions, I'm also always looking for that tension between fiction and reality.”
"We all know we bought a ticket, and yet we're willing to believe."
"Not that we pretend it isn't acted, but for me that's precisely where the tension lies, the beauty of theatre: we all know we bought a ticket, and yet we're willing to believe. You enter the magic, and you move in and out of that magic.
It's a social story, with the personal as political. Tove comes from a poor working-class background and has an ambition that, especially for women at the time, was unheard of. She's constantly told: you just have to get married. She isn't allowed to keep studying, not to go to Gymnasium or secondary school. She has to leave school at fourteen, then work, then find a husband, then cook. That is her entire future as it's laid out for her, without anyone in her environment ever questioning it. But she has big ambitions, she wants to write, something she's already doing a lot of from a young age. It's a beautiful story about what it means not to go along with the expectations of your life, but to choose your own life. So there are many different aspects to this story, which makes it interesting for theatre, both in form and in content.”
"It is a beautiful story about what it means to not to go along with the expectations of your life, but to choose your own life."
The books cover almost an entire life. What couldn't be missing in your adaptation?
“For me, it was important not to lose sight of her sense of herself as a writer, as an artist, as someone with ambition: that engine, that force inside her. Because when you make an adaptation like this, there are an enormous number of things from her background, things she goes through within a kind of coming-of-age: she gets her first kiss, she becomes pregnant, she has children. Really, all the developments a person can go through. Her writing and that ambition have to be like a beating heart beneath the whole production.”
In the books, many people from Tove's life pass-by, while the production is performed by eight actors. How did you approach that?
“In the adaptation, I linked different types of characters to a single performer. So many of the actors play a certain archetype. For example, Sanne den Hartogh plays Tove's brother, who encourages her from a young age to make her dream of becoming a writer come true. He also plays her second husband, in a way the great love of her life, and a kind of safe haven, the companion, the support. June Yanez plays several of Tove's female friends: characters who support her, and sometimes challenge her too, but who are often, as Tove herself describes it, a little tougher or cooler than Tove herself. So for each performer, there are a number of important recurring character types. Otherwise, switching between all those different people too quickly can turn into chaos. This way, I'm trying to make you feel that the performers do move through different characters around Tove, but still remain somewhat the same kind of figure.”
or the scenography, the idea of memories was the starting point. Ditlevsen herself called the books not autobiographies but memoirs: memories of her life. Together with set designer Pascal Leboucq, Arbo searched for a way to make those memories visible on stage.
“What Pascal has developed are several large curtains, faint imprints of rooms. It's a kind of latex-silicone material, which is reminiscent of Tove's skin. There's a passage in one of the books where she peels off her skin, as if it were sunburned, and underneath something new emerges, each time a new step in her life. So it comes from the imagery of her own book, that association with skin and physicality.
We wanted to create a kind of memory library, in which you can be in different places; imprints of a kitchen, a door, a window. It gives a sense of another time, but at the same time the material feels tactile, physical, a little dirty, and also modern. I find that a beautiful contradiction. Those curtains can float above Tove's head; they can, as it were, pluck pieces from that memory library and present and show different scenes from her life.
They're parts of her that always remain, almost like a kind of mobile floating above her, so they're always in view. It's a very beautiful story, of course, but, as I also said about Tove herself, it has a difficult edge. And how do you capture that in imagery, too? That ugliness is what we were searching for."
"She was a contradictory and rather radical figure."
Another essential part of the production is the music by composer Thijs van Vuure, with whom you've been working for years. Notably, the music doesn't sound the way you might expect for 1920s and 1930s Copenhagen. How did you find that musical direction?
“Thijs really wanted the music to come from the time in which she wrote the books. She wrote these books about her whole life, but of course not at the time itself, as a child. She wrote them in the late sixties and early seventies. That's also a very interesting time musically: it breaks with the postwar stuffiness of the forties and fifties, and you move toward something a bit more rock, something more radical.
That feeling also suits who Tove is as a person better. She was a contradictory and rather radical figure. With that in mind, we explored various sources of inspiration, and Thijs developed the musical world of the production. As a result, you hear in the music the same energy and contradictions that are so characteristic of Tove.”
