Learning to love the cold

[shewhomust]

I owe to Librarything the information that Barbara Wilson, whose lively and entertaining crime novels I so enjoyed (if you haven't met them, try Gaudi Afternoon, is now Barbara Sjoholm, author of various travel books, including The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland. There's nothing that consoles me for winter weather, and treacherous snow on the streets, so much as reading about real winter, serious cold, unmelting ice, so this sounded like just the book I needed right now, and to celebrate my new scanner, here's a taster. Returning to the Ice Hotel, a couple of years after her first visit, and this time as a guest rather than to observe its construction, Sjoholm finds adjacent to the hotel an ice theatre, an Ice Globe:

The Ice Globe hadn't existed my first time here in Jukkasjärvi; this was its second season. Earlier this afternoon I'd talked with Rolf Degerlund, who'd come up with the idea of the theater. Big and blond, with a furrowed forehead and neatly trimmed beard and moustache, and wearing a beat-up black sweater with a enveloping cowl, Rolf was the longtime director of the Norrbotten Theater in Luleå, a Swedish city on the Gulf of Bothnia. We sat at a wooden table in the bar across the street from the Icehotel and he told me that some years ago he'd had a vision. He'd visited London and had seen the newly restored Globe Theatre on the Thames. Why not re-create the theater in snow and ice back in northern Sweden? he thought on the plane. Back home he painted a watercolor of how such an ice theater might look, and hung it up in the living room.

About five years later Rolf was invited to speak at a confer­ence on tourism in the North. After talking for a while about the role of theater in attracting tourists above the Arctic Circle, he ended by lightheartedly describing his vision of a Globe Theatre built of snow and ice.

"I told them that my greatest dream was to become the world's first director of an ice theater," Rolf said. "Fifteen seconds after I was done speaking, a man popped up and said to me, 'I'll build you that theater. When do you want it done?'"

The man was Yngve Bergqvist, the Icehotel's CEO, probably the only person in the world who could have realized Rolf's dream. A year later, Hamlet was on the snow boards, and this year it was Macbeth, playing two nights a week, alternating with a short version of Verdi's opera Falstaff, a concert evening and one night devoted to showing films.

The Globe Theatre in London didn't look all that massive in photographs, but this replica did, looming up in front of me across the snow like a glacier in the dark. Designed by Åke Larsson, its construction was similar to the Icehotel's. It had been created bv jamming snice into large forms, letting below-freezing temperatures do their work, and then removing the forms. Perhaps the Ice Globe was simpler - it had no roof; it also, on the side less visible to theatergoers, had a wooden dressing room attached. The stage lights had to be kept on day and night so the bulbs wouldn't freeze.

At the entrance to the Ice Globe, we were handed silvery quilted ponchos with fur-trimmed hoods. Most of the audience were guests of the Icehotel next door and were already warmly clad in the fashionable black snowsuits, padded hood-hats, and boots that the management provides. Moving clumsily, we stumbled up narrow stairs cut out of hard-packed snow into the open-roofed the­ater. The tall, curved walls of snow around us were bathed in pale-blue light, and the stage, with its backdrop of crackled ice blocks, glittered with the same cool blue. Snow drifted down onto our heads. Our tiered seats were of snow; we each had a small polystyrene square to sit on. Behind us, more theatergoers crowded into boxes shaped of snow. Their silver ponchos made them look like wraiths floating above. Murmurs of awe and delight (teeth-chattering would come later) rumbled from within the hoods. We'd entered an enchanted space, and in such a setting found it easy to be transported to Shakespeare's world of ambition and madness, a world not so different from our own. Rolf Degerlund had chosen Macbeth deliberately, he told me, and had compressed the play to highlight its central theme: power run amok. My country was just ending its first year in Iraq.

She lays out all the cards: straightforward journalistic interview, enchantment at the beauty of the scene, a sly delight at the preposterousness of the entire enterprise = and then gathers them up with a conjuror's sleight of hand and throws them down in a different configuration. The performance is in the Sami language, the actors are Sami, the enterprise offers something unique to the wealthy and cultured tourists, but also gives Sami culture a new visibility, and Sjoholm is alive to all the ambivalence of the buying and selling game that is the tourist industry.

She is also the first person I have ever read who manages to convey, under all the interest and the beauty of what she sees, how cold it is all the time.