The Royal Dramatic Theatre

This guide follows the acting academy inside Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre, opened in 1908 behind an Art Nouveau facade of white dolomite marble paid for by public lottery. It centers on 1922, when a seventeen-year-old student won one of the school's few places and, without knowing it, caught the eye of a visiting Finnish film director watching from the rehearsal-room shadows. The same corridors later trained Ingrid Bergman, Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson, and the academy still auditions nervous teenagers here every year.