After the Rehearsal

After the Rehearsal centres on Henrik Vogler, an aging stage director who lingers in the empty theatre once rehearsals are over. His production of Strindberg's A Dream Play is underway, and Anna, the young actress playing the lead, returns to the stage on the pretext of looking for a piece of jewellery. Their conversation turns to her mother, Rakel, a one-time star of the theatre and Vogler's former lover, whose drinking and death still shape her daughter. The encounter draws Vogler into memories of Rakel and into questions about his own past, his affairs and the boundary between life and the stage. Rakel, Anna as a younger woman and Vogler as a young man also appear as the film moves between present and recollection.

Ingmar Bergman directed and wrote the film, the twenty-third of the twenty-four features he directed in chronological order, following Fanny and Alexander. Erland Josephson plays the older Vogler, with Ingrid Thulin as Rakel, Lena Olin as the older Anna, Nadja Palmstjerna-Weiss as the younger Anna and Bertil Guve as the younger Vogler. Jörn Donner produced this German-Swedish co-production, which runs seventy-four minutes.

It holds a 7.1 rating on IMDb from around 3,200 votes and a 6.9 on TMDB from a much smaller sample. A critics' rating of 7.9 from thirteen reviews places it somewhat above the audience scores.