Award-winning, Seismographic Lifestyle Satirist

As in her cartoon series – the famous daily strips Café and Homo Metropolis found until recently in the Danish newspaper Politiken, Werdelin’s forte is her sharp but loving gaze at her times and the many, quite ordinary people whose lives create those times with their caprices and idiosyncrasies.  This is seen in her own pastiche of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. She sets her play, Mine to søstre [My Two Sisters], in a summer house in fashionable northern Zealand.  Here, it becomes clear to everyone that you don’t have to scratch much beneath the surface of the sisters’ smart, fashion-magazine lives to reach the corrosion and corruption.

Nevertheless, we can sense Nikoline Werdelin’s empathy with her characters.  There are plenty of villains in her dramas.  People are not fundamentally nice creatures – they are full of flaws and cause harm to themselves and others.  Most often, they have both good and bad sides.  Yet, in her more recent pieces, Werdelin has become more implacable in her portrayals: there are people with no good sides – for example, the patriarch in Martas tema [Marta’s Theme], who wreaks havoc in the household with his psychic and physical violence.  Yet, Werdelin lets us know why he and others like him in her plays go so far.  But this does not mean that she or we are to forgive them for their actions.

Werdelin’s dramas have a melancholy tenderness about them.  It is no accident that Anton Chekhov is the playwright to which her pieces most often refer.   Her dramas often play on the notion of a happy ending, but it never quite comes off as the audience might want.  To the contrary, comedies often turn into tragedies.  This is the case, for example, with the vivacious young nurse in Boblerne i bækken [The Robin-Anthems] who dies before the cancer patients in her ward. Or when Hanne, the patient in Akvariefuglen [The Aquarium Bird], commits suicide just when she is actually beginning to improve.

Current Productions

Akvariefuglen / The Aquarium Bird
(2005)
The play is set in a psychiatric ward.  Four patients are in group therapy under the guidance of a famous female professor. When the group is expanded to include a new patient, it has fateful consequences for them all.

Martas tema / Marta’s Theme
(2005)
The performance builds a bridge between two periods:  Copenhagen at the turn of the century and the present.  The link between the two epochs is a piece of music by the composer Salicath, whose origin and murky background the play gradually unfolds.  A revelation from the past sets in motion a series of events in the contemporary era.

Boblerne i bækken / The Robin-Anthems
(2003)
The title of the play is a quote from Danish poet Emil Aarestrup. The play is set in a cancer ward with five men who are terminally ill.  The drama reveals their stories and final days.
Translations: Danish, Swedish, English, German and French

Liebhaverne / The Aficionados
(1996)
This debut play is a finely-honed satire of the playwright’s own generation and its spoiled attitude towards life.  It is a generation of aficionados, who always want the best, the most perfect, whose lives become an eternal, never-to-be-satisfied quest for ultimate perfection.
Translations: Danish, Swedish and French

Review Extracts

“Her observations are merciless, while still containing great sympathy.  Ultimately, it is not the characters we laugh at but the fragility of life itself.”
Svenska Dagbladet (SE), Boblerne i bækken

“… when we get to know these five gentlemen, all suffering from cancer, we see that Nikoline Werdelin has written a direct, unsentimental and liberatingly funny play about people as people – even when they are patients”.
Verdens Gang (NO), Boblerne i bækken

“As in her cartoon strips, dramatist Nikoline Werdelin is, to a great degree, her quick, precise lines.  Liebhaverne… is reminiscent of something the 'lifestyle satirist' Alan Ayckbourn could have written”.
Dagens Nyheter (NO), Liebhaverne