Demons That Live in Sunlight: Problems in Staging Strindberg

Abstract

Strindberg is one of the most puzzling of the great dramatists, not simply because his work is difficult, but because it seems to be slapdash. He is clearly a seminal figure in modern playwriting and theatre practice, a pioneer of naturalism in its most complex forms, the father of expressionism. In the preface to Miss Julie (i888), a play which he himself subtitled 'A Naturalistic Tragedy', he compiled a revolutionary manifesto against the conventions of nineteenth-century dramaturgy, developing Zola's ideas on the subject in terms of practical theatre. Almost all his own drama, and much more recent dramatic writing, is truly indebted to these lucid formulations. Always unbalanced, he suffered in the 89gos a period of appalling mental disturbance. He gave up writing, took to alchemy, suffered from hallucinations, and was in constant fear of becoming completely mad and being confined in an asylum. On waking, as it were, from this agonizing dream, he began to explore a new kind of drama, a blending of hallucination, dream, and life itself: an attempt to express in dramatic terms the ambivalent nature of human experience as he had encountered it during and after his breakdown. These works, of his so-called post-inferno period, are strikingly original in conception and execution, and are the forerunners not only of the German expressionist drama of the early twentieth century, but also of a variety of dramatic techniques that may still be considered thoroughly avant-garde. He returned to writing for the stage with a tremendous outburst of creative energy, and completed no fewer than twenty new and original pieces between the first part of To Damascus (1898) and A Dream Play, his own favourite among his works, in I9I0. In fact, he had always written quickly, and, not surprisingly, the output is uneven. More than this, even undoubted masterpieces are often seemingly mixed in quality. MissJulie, To Damascus, Part I, and even A Dream Play itself, are ragged, repetitive, inconsistent, and sometimes dull. The style and intention of his plays can tack about with arbitrary suddenness. There seems a lack of balance and proportion in them, as in the writer's own personality. The characters are sometimes strikingly particular, sometimes generalized into banality. Profound emotion, esoteric philosophy, telling observation, and mere petulance jockey for position, and vanish as soon as they have won it. The plays, whether naturalistic or expressionistic, can be a reader's nightmare, alternately pedantic and electrifying, wild and