Reading a new collection of scripts by the Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman, in contemporary Calcutta is a disconcerting experience. One wonders whether Bergman is dead, or Calcutta. The Fifth Act - published this year by Seagull Books - is the English translation of four scripts assembled by Bergman himself in 1994, more than a decade after his sumptuous farewell to cinema with Fanny and Alexander. This was when he died for Calcutta. But these texts, written for the theatre and television, are evidence of the continuing life of Bergman's creativity even after his decision to 'hang up' his camera, as he had put it then. These are invaluable 'late' works, obsessively reflecting on the origins of his art in the theatre. But they also show how, with the help of a brilliant group of veteran actors, a master of 'classical' cinema and theatre adapts himself to television, without compromising the essence of his mature creativity. Three of the four scripts - After the Rehearsal, The Last Scream and In the Presence of a Clown - ended up as TV films in the Eighties and Nineties. Bergman has also recently finished Anna, a sequel, for television, to his 1973 series, Scenes From a Marriage. Yet, despite this inventiveness, The Fifth Act is a terminal collection. The epigraph from Peer Gynt ('You won't die in the middle of the final act'); the greyness of the protagonists, all given to relentless elegizing; the recurring image of an empty, old, darkened theatre, haunted by Shakespeare, Ibsen and Strindberg (the spirits of the craft); the memento mori clown, Rigmor, sodomized by the mad inventor of 'living talking' cinematography - all these become part of a grisliness which pervades these pieces. 'It's death, you understand. It's nibbling at me like an eager little rat,' says Henrik Vogler, the theatre director in After the Rehearsal, directing Strindberg's Dream Play for the fourth time. 'He is 109 years old, or maybe just 62,' according to Bergman's stage direction. In the late Bergman, this ever-present, and often macabre, sense of mortality has become part of a larger preoccupation with the contemporary value of his achievements. In Images: My Life in Film - written in the Nineties, after watching forty years of his own work in film over the span of a year - he recalls a book, Bergman on Bergman, which was based on a series of interviews. He describes his interviewers for this earlier book as 'little by little reconstructing a dinosaur piece by piece with the kind assistance of the Monster himself'. The Fifth Act dramatizes four such reconstructions. And the Monster Himself is always there. He is a masterful but exhausted creature, 'the old man of the theatre'. As a Lear-Prospero, he repeatedly transforms a 'boundless continent of mysterious shadows' into 'staged chaos', with his 'depraved, dusty, shitty instrument'. This instrument is either the camera or the stage with its actors. In fact, the collection's introductory monologue expresses a curious indifference to the question of the right medium for these pieces, an indifference which is both unmistakably modern and audaciously classical: 'I wrote the texts in this book without giving a thought to their possible media, using a method something like that of the harpsichord sonatas by Bach...They can be played by string quartets, wind ensembles, guitar, organ, or piano...It looks like drama but could just as easily be film, television, or simply texts for reading.' Bach is important here, as he has always been for Bergman. In Jorge Luis Borges's story, 'Shakespeare's Memory', Professor Sörgel's only antidote to the terror and oppression of having actually inherited Shakespeare's memory is 'strict, vast music - Bach'. The strict and the vast, but especially the strict, are integral to Bergman's classicism. It is difficult to think of the emotionally exhausting rigours of the vintage Bergman - each film a dark night of the soul - in terms of what we normally associate with the classical. Yet, for Vogler in After the Rehearsal, the art of the theatre is close to the art of the fugue: 'I think that our art is moral. By moral I mean bound by law. If you break the law you will be punished and the punishment is unambiguous: you will not reach your audience.' Rehearsals are, therefore, a form of rigorous work, in which the only acceptable approach to the boundlessness, difficulties and darkness of artistic creation is through the 'mechanism of repetition'. This phrase again recalls much of Bach's contrapuntal work, and also the minimalist music of more recent times, which could not have been composed without Bach. Vogler's words to the young actress, Anna, reappear almost exactly as Bergman's own in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern. Here again, Bergman distances himself from the art of 'improvisation', and from 'the spontaneous, the unconsidered, the imprecise'. Filming or directing a play is 'an illusion planned in detail', and the script is where it must all be put down. In The Fifth Act, the open script on a music stand is always part of the haunted stage. It is an almost magical prop, holding - and often withholding - in itself the possibility of infinite repetition. It stands next to Vogler in the grey, indirect light of the old theatre, 'its pages scribbled over with the illegible notes, arrows and crosses'. The director is also, therefore, a ghost writer, apart from being a musician manqué (Bergman called his early filmscripts 'scores'). This free-ranging mastery is, in a way, the imperious old Wagnerian dream, and helps us understand Bergman's ancestry as an European artist-dinosaur. But in him, this grand legacy speaks a starkly puritanical, anti-Romantic, and hence Classical, language. (Wagner in the garb of a strict Swedish pastor.) Even Berg- man's house on the island of Fårö, with its own screening room where he often watches his own films, has become a private Bayreauth of classical cinema, a 'counterweight to the theatre', embodying the principles of 'simplification, proportion, exertion, relaxation, breathing'. Yet, Bergman's most unconsoling film about schizophrenia, Through a Glass Darkly, is set on this magic island. The counterpoint to Bach in Bergman's classicism is, of course, Mozart. The 'self-discipline, purity, light and quiet', the 'order and kindness' which Vogler wants at his rehearsals are all enduringly realized for Bergman in the music and drama of Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute. Bergman had directed it on stage and filmed it for television in the Seventies. Vogler's, and his creator's, vision of the director's profession as 'a pedantic administration of the unspeakable', organizing and ritualizing by means of an inner discipline, is as close to the art of Shakespeare's Prospero as to that of Mozart's priest, Sarastro, whose essence is heard in the beautiful, grave music of the Temple Guards' chorus. For Bergman, at the 'keel' of this music is still Bach, but leavened by Mozart's celebration of profane love. Love, purity, kindness and stillness are not, however, the qualities one normally thinks of in relation to what happens in Bergman's films and writings. And the pieces in The Fifth Act are no exceptions. He has described his own films as 'conceived in the depths of my soul, in my heart, my brain, my nerves, my sex, and not the least, in my guts. A nameless desire gave them birth.' In Bergman's art, the nerves, the sex and the guts are taken up into a discipline and a sensibility which define themselves in terms of classical notions of order and craftsmanship. And this brings us back to the Monster, for Bergman's best films are never too far away from the monstrous cruelty of High Art. In Through a Glass Darkly, the schizophrenic Karin's father, a writer, feels little remorse when Karin finds out, in a lucid moment, that he keeps a detailed diary of the progress of her illness for later use in his writing. And this 'cold eye' is central to Bergman's classicism. 'I have a little butcher in me,' says Vogler to Anna in After the Rehearsal. Although he has seduced Anna - his ex-lover's young daughter - at every level, the play ends with Vogler's terrible remoteness. 'My sadness has nothing to do with you,' he tells her before she disappears into the shadows. From Keats's Grecian urn ('Cold Pastoral') to Thomas Mann's portrayal of Goethe as the great classical artist in Lotte in Weimar, the 'absolute gaze of art' has always been 'at once absolute love and absolute nihilism and indifference', implying 'that horrifying approach to the godlike-diabolic which we call genius'. The Fifth Act ends, however, not with the coldness of art, but in the chill of death. Cinema and the theatre are locked in a competitive struggle throughout this collection. In the Presence of a Clown comes last, and here this struggle is actually watched over by the figure of death: Rigmor, the clown, is forever waiting in the wings. With Carl Åkerblom, and his fiancee, Pauline, struggling in an 'icy winter country' to present their 'Talking Cinema Drama', Bergman's film journeys from the desolation of insanity, through the vitality and inventiveness of pure theatre, towards death and nothingness. This could have been a Shakespearean celebration of the triumph of theatre over cinema, of one kind of illusion over another. But the film ends on an altogether bleaker note: 'Pauline walks over to the bed and lies down on Åkerblom. She moves a hand up to his eyes, and then her hand...closes them'. Bergman has often used images of death when talking about art. In Images, art is 'a snake's skin full of ants. The snake is long since dead, emptied, deprived of its poison, but the skin moves, full of bustling life'. But the famous Dance of Death, at the end of The Seventh Seal, becomes an apocalyptic vision of the death of cinema itself in Bergman's own account of how it was shot: 'Assistants, electricians, a make-up man and two summer visitors, who never knew what it was all about, had to dress up in the costumes of those condemned to death. A camera with no sound was set up and the picture shot before the cloud dissolved.'