Staging History: A Reading of Cecilie Løveid’s Maria Q (1994)

This article examines the reshaping of the period of the Second World War in Cecilie Løveid’s play Maria Q, a drama centered on the enigmatic historical figure of Mara Vasilyevna Pasetchnikova, better known as Maria Quisling, the second wife of Vidkun Quisling, who was Norway’s fascist prime minister during that war. Drawing on studies of historical fiction and intertextuality, this article aims to show how Cecilie Løveid employed the genre of historical drama but transformed it so that she could offer her reimagining of the war period in Norway to a present-day audience. I read Maria Q as an experimental historical drama in which Løveid not only used her freedom as a writer of dramatic fiction to combine fact with imagination but simultaneously incorporated various texts and genres as sources to further her own multifaceted reimagining of Maria Quisling as a complex character. As I will demonstrate, by foregrounding dialogism as her central dimension, Løveid rejected a unitary, monologic and authoritarian conception both of recent Norwegian history and of Maria Quisling’s role in it.