VIVIAN NIELSEN (born 1962) graduated from the theatre school of Aarhus Theatre in 1987 as an actress. She has performed at many Danish theatres, and she quickly became known as a versatile actress. Later, she trained as a director with Ralf Långbacka and as a screenwriter with Dara Mark. Today she is known as one of the most productive and performed Danish playwrights with an impressive number of fine plays. Her oeuvre of more than 30 stage plays includes numerous stage adaptations of novels and films, among them film director Lars von Trier’s BREAKING THE WAVES, and plays based on the lives of historical characters. Nielsen may take existing material as her starting point, but she certainly has a voice of her own. She writes about contemporary society with a sharp, critical eye, often from a woman’s point of view. Characteristically for her plays is a magnificent and poetic stage vocabulary with a surprising use of the language – almost Shakespearesque, a reviewer once wrote. Vivian Nielsen has received several grants and acknowledgements for her work, among them a Reumert Prize for her play BRANDES. In 2010, theatre critic Anne Middelboe Christensen quoted this definition in an address: “If there is one thing Vivian Nielsen does, it is to subject problems to debate. Indeed, in her plays it is almost all she does, no matter how varied they are, with an approach to the world and to the stage driven by anger, bewilderment and annoyance.
Vivian Nielsen © Emilia Therese
