As part of the Strindberg Festival held in Stockholm during May, 1981, the Stockholm Stadsteater presented a putatively polemical version of the play Fadren with the slightly reconstructed title Fadern instead. In the foyer of the theater the play's audiences encountered displays intended to reveal the socio— economic plight of women in Strindberg's day; during the performance they were faced with Laura cast as a harassed, hapless victim rather than an implacable vampire; and upon its conclusion they departed in contemplation of the final image of the daughter Bertha, who had stood at the edge of the stage in order to focus the director's entreaties: the scarred survivor of an unfortunate parental conflict, an innocent victim of yet another skirmish in the "battle of the sexes" in which the male (including by implication the author of the play) was primarily at fault. Neither Bertha nor her mother, nor apparently even her father, was meant to be aware of anything to do with that "psychic murder" ("själamord") which Strindberg thought could be brought about in what he called the "battle of the brains" (hjärnomas kamp") instead. Yet in fact Fadern left an impression overwhelmingly different from what the director Jan Hä:anson desired. In the role of the captain Adolf, the actor Keve Hjelm had managed to transcend his director's peculiar intent, simply by conveying Strindberg's ineradicable subjectivity. At the Strindberg Symposium held as part of the Festival in Stockholm, Hjelm himself explained — much to Hakanson's apparent consternation — why this had happened: for him The Father was a philosophical expression. of the existential plight of the human soul, not at all a mere excuse to issue ideological equivocations.