STRINDBERG AND

MODERNIST THEATRE
Post-Inferno Drama on the Stage

FREDERICK J. MARKER

LISE-LONE MARKER
         
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 

       page vi

  ix

 Before Inferno: Strindberg and nineteenth-century theatre 

 Toward a new theatre: To Damascus 
Strindberg and the New Stagecraft 
The Molander alternative 
Scenes from a marriage 
To Damascus in the contemporary theatre 

 A theatre of dreams: A Dream Play 

Dreams fantastical, worlds apart 
From allegory to autobiography: Reinhardt and Molander 
Actors in an empty space 
A Dream Play in the contemporary theatre 

 Chamber theatre: The Ghost Sonata 

From experiment to renewal 
The Bergman variations 
The Ghost Sonata in the contemporary theatre 

   
        
  

v
 

 Photograph of the Asylum scene in the world premiere

of To Damascus I, Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm
(Dramaten), 
Courtesy of Drottningholms Theatermuseum page 
 By the Sea: photograph from the  production of
To Damascus I
Courtesy of Drottningholms Theatermuseum 
 Design sketch by Knut Ström for To Damascus III ()
Courtesy of Drottningholms Theatermuseum 
 Setting by Sven-Erik Skawonius for the opening scene
of To Damascus I, directed by Olof Molander, 
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 By the Sea: setting by Skawonius for the  production
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 The opening scene in Ingmar Bergman’s production
of To Damascus I–II, Dramaten, 
Photograph by Beata Bergström 
 Staging of the Kitchen scene in Bergman’s production of
To Damascus I–II
Photograph by Beata Bergström 
 The Café scene in Bergman’s production of
To Damascus I–II
Photograph by Beata Bergström 
 Erwin Axer’s staging of the Kitchen and the Asylum
scenes in To Damascus at the Residenztheater, Munich,

Photographs by Eva Titus 
 The Growing Castle: design by Carl Grabow for the
world premiere of A Dream Play, Svenska teatern, 
Courtesy of Drottningholms Theatermuseum 
vi
    vii
 Design by Svend Gade for A Dream Play ()
Courtesy of Drottningholms Theatermuseum 
 Design by Alfred Roller for the Cathedral scene in Max
Reinhardt’s production of A Dream Play, Dramaten, 
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 Photograph of the Roller setting for the Lawyer’s
chamber in the Reinhardt production
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 Photograph of the setting for Foulstrand in the Reinhardt
production
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 Scene in the Lawyer’s chamber in the Reinhardt
production
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 Outside the Castle: the setting for the final scene in
the Reinhardt production of A Dream Play
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 Multiple settings by Skawonius for the Molander
production of A Dream Play, Dramaten, 
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 Setting by Skawonius for Foulstrand in the
Molander production
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 Setting and projection by Arne Walentin for A Dream Play,
Oslo, 
Photograph courtesy of Det Norske Teatret 
 The Theatre Corridor in Bergman’s production of
A Dream Play, Dramaten, 
Photograph by Beata Bergström 
 Scene from Bergman’s production of A Dream Play,
Dramaten, 
Photograph by Bengt Wanselius; courtesy of Dramaten 
 The Theatre Corridor scene in Robert Lepage’s
production of A Dream Play, Dramaten, 
Photograph by Bengt Wanselius; courtesy of Dramaten 
 The final scene in Robert Wilson’s production of A Dream
Play, Stockholm City Theatre, 
Photograph by Lesley Leslie Spinks; courtesy of
Stockholms Stadsteater 
viii   
 Hummel and the Mummy in Reinhardt’s production
of The Ghost Sonata, 
Sketch by Gerda Plough-Sarp in Teatret (–) 
 The Ghost Supper in The Spook Sonata at the
Provincetown Playhouse, New York, 
Photograph by Francis Bruguière in Theatre Arts Monthly 
 Setting by Skawonius for the first scene in Molander’s
production of The Ghost Sonata, Dramaten, 
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 Setting for the third scene in Molander’s  revival of
The Ghost Sonata
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 The Ghost Supper in Bergman’s  revival of The Ghost
Sonata at Dramaten
Photograph by Beata Bergström 
 Setting and projection by Marik Vos for the third scene of
The Ghost Sonata, Dramaten, 
Courtesy of Dramaten’s library 
 Scene from the Bergman revival of The Ghost Sonata,
Dramaten, 
Photograph by Bengt Wanselius; courtesy of Dramaten 
 
Before Inferno: Strindberg and
nineteenth-century theatre

It could be said of August Strindberg, as it has often been said of Yeats,

that he wrote himself out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
The great period of experimentation that produced the dream plays and
the chamber plays began just before the turn of the century, in the after-
math of the massive psychic upheaval Strindberg described as his Inferno
(–). Of the plays written before that personal crisis, only a small
handful – notably Miss Julie, The Father, and Master Olof – have sustained
a subsequent history of major productions. All three of these, moreover,
point forward and are linked in one way or another to the plays and
poetics of his post-Inferno period. All this having been said, however, it
would nevertheless be misleading to overlook altogether Strindberg’s ap-
prenticeship in the nineteenth-century theatre and its conventions. The
earlier plays and their first productions laid an important groundwork
of experience. It was from this basis that his dramaturgy and theatre
poetics developed, at a time when the new influence of modern drama
and theatre was becoming an increasingly dominant force.
“It is impossible to set up rules for theatrical art, but it ought to be
contemporary.” This statement, reiterated many times by Strindberg in
varying contexts during the course of his career, points to a fundamen-
tal characteristic of his theatre practice. Almost from the outset, his art
became a restless search for new forms capable of meeting the changing
demands of the consciousness of the time, as seen from his uniquely per-
sonal point of view. Both as a playwright and as a theorist, Strindberg
kept in touch with the newest directions and developments in theatre and
drama, ready both to absorb and reshape them in his own way. As the
arch rebel and social iconoclast, he was the ardent champion of a com-
prehensive revitalization of the theatre which, by the end of the nineties,
he was convinced could only be accomplished through a redefinition of
the nature of the theatrical experience itself. During the decades preced-
ing that realization, his idea of theatre underwent radical change. This

    
process was not, however, one of continuous, linear, or even consistent
development. Instead, its course was defined by an oscillating succession
of experiments that led, gradually but surely, to a total rejection of the
accepted conventions of stage illusion and dramatic construction, as in-
adequate means of expressing the mystical and visionary aspects of life
that, to an increasing extent, he came to regard as the true fabric of
reality.
During a brief, unhappy period as an aspiring actor in , Strindberg
had his first taste of the theatrical climate and repertory of the day. His
“debut” at Dramaten came in a revival of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Maria
Stuart in Scotland, in which he played a messenger with fewer than a dozen
lines to speak. A grander scheme, to make his real stage debut as the
stormy romantic hero Karl Moor in Schiller’s The Robbers, predictably
came to nought. He quickly found his footing as a playwright, how-
ever, and his first produced play appeared in . This was a one-act
verse drama called In Rome [I Rom], a Scribean vignette of anecdotal
history depicting an incident in the life of the renowned sculptor Bertel
Thorvaldsen, who as a young artist is saved from despair when an unex-
pected benefactor (Thomas Hope) commissions the famous Jason statue.
Acted at Dramaten by an exceptional cast that included Axel Elmlund
as an elegant, elegiac Thorvaldsen, this anonymous “Swedish original”
enjoyed an auspicious run of eleven performances in the – sea-
son. At the start of his career as a playwright, Strindberg was strongly
influenced by the traditional romantic preoccupation with history, saga,
and folklore that had also characterized the early work of both Ibsen and
Bjørnson a generation earlier. The influence of his great Scandinavian
¯
predecessors is plainly evident in The Outlaw [Den fred̄löse], a new one-acter
Strindberg brought to the stage at Dramaten the next season. The theme
of this saga drama is the conflict of Christianity and heathenism in
twelfth-century Iceland. This time, however, the play met a chilly re-
ception. Alfred Hanson, a decorative but rather wooden actor with a
soporific delivery, was no match for the towering Viking hero Thorfinn
(“a titan, a Prometheus who struggles against the gods”), and the
-year-old dramatist learned a useful lesson about a play’s dependence
upon the exigencies of performance.
More than nine years elapsed before another Strindberg play reached
the Stockholm stage. Although he submitted the first prose version of
Master Olof [Mäster Olof ] to Dramaten as early as , the theatre’s
readers were reluctant to recommend a work in which the historical char-
acters seemed so altered from their traditional conceptions – though this
   -  
was obviously the author’s whole point in this early masterpiece. At Nya
teatern, where a bolder artistic policy came to prevail, the pioneering
manager–director Ludvig Josephson eventually accepted the original
prose version of the play, preferring it above the verse version published
in . The prominent naturalistic director August Lindberg staged the
premiere of this sprawling historical chronicle at Josephson’s theatre at
the end of . Strindberg’s typically revisionist view of familiar figures of
sixteenth-century Swedish history depicts Olaus Petri, biblical translator
and influential champion of Luther’s teachings, as an unheroic protago-
nist, a vacillating, hyperreflective religious revolutionary who, unlike the
fiery and uncompromising rebel Gert Bookprinter, betrays himself and
his beliefs. In terms of its style, the play’s loose form, multiple changes of
scene, and incisive use of realistic detail also challenged accepted conven-
tions. The centre of energy in Lindberg’s riveting six-hour production
was the larger-than-life characterization of Gert created by the young
Emil Hillberg, whose demonic fanaticism and black humour provided
a striking contrast to the weak-willed Olof of William Engelbrecht. The
play made Hillberg the new star of Swedish theatre, while its author at
last found himself acclaimed as one of the foremost dramatists of the
early s.
Strindberg’s interest in the history-play genre would reassert itself in his
post-Inferno work, but in the early years he also experimented with the
use of period setting in a different way, as a framing device for domestic
dramas of married life that reflected his own initially contented but
increasingly harrowing emotional life with his first wife, the strong-willed
actress Siri von Essen. She played the staunchly loyal Margaretha in The
Secret of the Guild [Gillets hemlighet] at Dramaten in , in a production
that marked a crucial step toward her husband’s definitive breakthrough
as a playwright the following year. Reminiscent of Ibsen’s The Pretenders,
this four-act play dramatizes the rival claims of two fifteenth-century
master builders vying for the honour of completing the cathedral at
Uppsala. One of them is a man who possesses the true strength of a great
calling; the other, his own son, is the dishonest and inept pretender who is
ultimately thwarted in his ambition when the tower he has constructed
collapses. A closing scene in which Margaretha, wife of the humbled
upstart, forgives and (in his own words) “redeems” her repentant husband
provided a consoling outcome. The Strindbergian theme of marriage as
an emotional battleground is more strongly stated in Sir Bengt’s Wife
[Herr Bengts hustru], a five-act medieval pastiche in which Siri von Essen
again enjoyed great success as Margit in its production at Nya teatern
    
in . She is Strindberg’s alternative to Nora in a play that quite
evidently presents an answer of sorts to A Doll’s House. After the rebellious
Margit has deserted husband and child and has attempted suicide, the
marital combatants are at last reconciled in the end, as a love stronger
than either rational logic or individual will prevails over the inevitable
warfare of the sexes.
Lucky Per’s Journey [Lycko-Pers resa], which proved to be one of
Strindberg’s most popular successes when produced at Nya teatern at the
end of , also employs a vaguely medieval setting, but this fairy-tale
fantasy denotes a move in an entirely new and significant direction. In this
work the playwright embarked, as it were, on a drama of pilgrimage that
he continued years later in the much harsher, more phantasmagorical
atmosphere of The Keys to Heaven [Himmelrikets nycklar, ], a fantasia in
which a heartbroken smith searching for his dead children joins an aging
and forgetful Saint Peter in a hopeless quest for the keys to heaven. The
culmination of Strindberg’s artistic pilgrimage would be the great jour-
ney plays of the post-Inferno period. Unlike these other works, however,
Lucky Per’s Journey retains a bitter-sweet fairy-tale quality that is resonant
with echoes of the major works of Scandinavian romanticism – Adam
Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and not least the stories and
fairy-tale plays of Hans Christian Andersen. After young Per leaves the
belfry in which he has been raised, he wanders the world in search of
happiness, discovering in the process that nothing is what he had imag-
ined it to be. Instead, like many an Andersen figure with a wishing ring
and a fairy godmother, he learns that the realization of his dreams of
gold and honour and power brings with it only bitter disillusionment.
The fleeting, dreamlike transitions in this play, its replacement of the
logic of reality with the imaginative logic of a fairy tale, and its invocation
of a realism of the unreal are all signposts that point ahead to the dra-
maturgy of the mature dream plays. As it was originally conceived and
performed, however, Lucky Per belongs squarely in spirit to the romantic
theatre of pictorial illusion. In its use of transparencies, startling transfor-
mations, and a multiplicity of elaborately representational settings for its
short, kaleidoscopic scenes, it took full advantage of the spectacular stage
effects and mechanical wizardry of which the painted wing-and-border
stage of the nineteenth century was capable. Consider, for example, the
second-act changement à vue in which “a snow-covered forest” at dawn,
with “an ice-covered brook” running across the stage in the foreground,
is transformed “from winter to summer: the ice melts on the brook and
it runs freely over the stones, while the sun shines over the entire scene.”
   -  
Eventually, Strindberg would come to look upon a realistic representation
of such an effect on the stage as “wasted effort,” simply because the care-
ful, detailed setting required to bring it off convincingly only detracted
from the dreamlike mood it endeavoured to convey. Before his crucial
reorientation toward simplification, however, he had to pass through a
phase coloured, as he later writes, by a “naturalistic taste, adapted to the
materialistic objectives of the age, [that] strove for realistic accuracy.”
During this earlier stage in his development, his primary concern thus
became the intensification of an illusion of objective, credible reality in
the theatre.
Always closely attuned to new theatrical directions – and always ready
to acknowledge debts of literary or theatrical influence – Strindberg was
preoccupied from the early s with the emergence of naturalism and
its quest for a “new formula” for art. With The Father [Fadren, ]
his writing underwent a radical change that he was certain represented
the formula for which “the young Frenchmen” were still searching. For
this playwright, the term “naturalism” was synonymous from the outset
with what he comes to describe, in “On Modern Theatre and Modern
Drama” (), as “the great style, the deep probing of the human soul.”
He was never convinced by the merely photographic aspects of the move-
ment or by its sometimes exaggerated insistence on the reproduction of
the details of surface reality. “If a woman is seduced in a hothouse,” he
writes dryly, “it isn’t necessary to relate the seduction to all the potted
plants you can find there and list them all by name.” Instead, what he
calls greater naturalism is that “which seeks out the points where the
great battles are fought, which loves to see what you do not see every
day, which delights in the struggle between natural forces, whether these
forces are called love and hate, rebellious or social instinct, which finds
the beautiful or ugly unimportant if only it is great.” In this interpreta-
tion, the elements of external verisimilitude in the naturalistic style serve
only as a means of achieving an intensification of dramatic mood and
conflict.
In this way, the unrelenting struggle for dominance and survival that
rages between Laura and the Captain, the titanic contestants in The
Father, acquired added horror for its first audiences by being so concretely
anchored in a contemporary bourgeois milieu they found familiar. Yet
the conflict in the play quickly takes on an added dimension, bursting
the bounds of mere realism and confronting us with a harrowing dra-
matic image of hell as mutual psychic torment. The suggestion that the
Captain is not the real father of his only child festers and grows to an
    
obsession that severs his ties with objective reality, undermines the basis
of his very existence, and ends by bringing on the fatal stroke he suffers
when his female persecutors lure him onto a straitjacket. But here, as
in the subsequent plays of gender warfare, the primary emphasis is not
on the customary naturalistic interaction of character and a convinc-
ingly lifelike environment. In The Father, as in such one-acters as Creditors
[Fordringsägare, ] and The Bond [Bandet, ] as well as in both parts of
The Dance of Death [Dödsdansen, ], the sex wars take place in a context
of detailed verisimilitude. However, their full theatrical impact derives
from the evocation of a wrenching, nightmarish atmosphere that tran-
scends this reality, yet nevertheless remains familiar by virtue of a tightly
controlled realistic technique. What one might call an almost Ibsenian
blend of naturalism and symbolism (“super-naturalism,” O’Neill later
chose to call it) becomes even more evident in The Dance of Death, an
anomalous work that, although written after the Inferno, still retains the
style and features of the earlier marriage plays to which it is generically
linked.
Zola, the principal spokesman for naturalism in the theatre of the
late nineteenth century, appears not to have been wholly convinced by
Strindberg’s idea of a “greater” naturalism. In a letter (December ,
) occasioned by the publication of the French translation of
The Father, he objected that “the Captain without a name [and] the oth-
ers who are almost entirely abstract figures do not give me as powerful a
sense of reality as I demand.” The inaccuracy of Zola’s statement about
the namelessness of the Captain (whose name is Adolf ) has often been
noticed. Equally misleading is his broader judgment that the play lacks a
strong “sense of reality.” It was precisely the shock of its realistic immedi-
acy that almost completely overshadowed the reception of its first perfor-
mance, which opened at Casino Theatre in Copenhagen in November
 amidst a storm of controversy. Directed by Hans Riber Hunderup,
the production became, above all, an ideological battleground of oppos-
ing tastes. To demonstrate his solidarity, Georg Brandes even took the
unusual step of attending rehearsals. “From the very outset one could see
how numerous the Strindbergians, or those whose natures were more or
less in sympathy with the Strindbergian tendency, were in attendance: the
applause which was heard from beginning to end was truly enthusiastic,”
the critic for Nationaltidende (November , ) observed. “Whether this
success will last more than a very few evenings remains quite another
matter. So far as we are concerned, we think not.” Despite their praise of
the play’s technique, most of its first reviewers took strong exception to
   -  
the unrelenting despair of Strindberg’s vision. Berlingske Tidende summed
up the reaction of a large conservative majority impervious to a fervent
campaign by the Brandes brothers on behalf of Strindberg and mod-
ernism: “Despite the talent revealed in the technical construction of the
play, it nevertheless remains a bitter, unpoetic fruit on the arid tree of
realism.”
At the eye of the critical hurricane was the unnerving straitjacket
scene. “How far have we actually drifted, when that grim instrument
of the insane asylum, the straitjacket, has managed to become a means
of gaining effect on the stage?” demanded the angry critic for Dagbladet
(November ). “An uglier, more revolting scene has probably never been
presented in a Danish theatre. Those who only read the play have no
conception of how incredibly nerve-racking this sight is. . . . The mood of
the real audience – those who had not attended a demonstration – was
oppressed and indignant.” This particular observer’s logic is interesting:
precisely because a play like The Father speaks to everyone in a theatre,
modern drama “has no right to use such unrefined and brutal means to
achieve effect,” he insists. Although Aftonbladet (November ) might ar-
gue that “in its scenic effectiveness it ranks on a level with the very best in
modern dramatic literature,” the harrowing straitjacket scene remained
the focus of conservative umbrage. “The drama is bleak enough as it is,
so crushing and depressing that this scene is the drop that makes the cup
run over,” the reviewer for Nationaltidende declared, while his like-minded
colleague at Dags-Telegrafen added: “We can well understand why indi-
vidual spectators stood up this evening during the third act and left the
auditorium.”
Although Hunderup’s actors, accustomed to the light Casino reper-
tory, lacked the requisite strength and technique for this demanding task,
their performances, with Hunderup and his future wife Johanne Krum
in the leading roles, won high praise. “When one must daily hold an audi-
ence through the aid of exaggerated outward action with many gestures
and grimaces, it is no small problem when, for once, one must return
to the evenness and naturalness that are the devices of all good plays,”
Edvard Brandes observed in Politiken. He was especially impressed, how-
ever, by the able portrayal of Laura, “acted with a natural and heavy
tone of voice that has an extremely intense effect.” Strindberg’s own
conception of the proper performance style for his play was, at this time,
characterized by a similar emphasis on a subdued naturalistic approach.
“Act the play as Lindberg acted Ibsen; that is, not tragedy, not comedy,
but something in between,” he wrote in a letter (December , )
    
addressed to the management of Nya teatern, which was preparing to
stage the Swedish premiere. “Don’t take too fast a tempo as we did
to begin with here at the Casino. Rather, let it creep forward quietly,
evenly, until it gathers momentum of its own accord towards the last
act. Exception: the Captain’s speeches when his idée fixe has broken out.
They should be spoken rapidly, abruptly, spat out, repeatedly breaking
the atmosphere.” The role must be played with “the superior, self-
mocking, slightly cynical air of a man of the world,” Strindberg wrote
to the young novelist Axel Lundegård a month before the Hunderup
premiere (October , ): “This is what is modern in my tragedy, and
woe betide me and the clown if he goes overboard and acts The Robbers
in . No shrieks, no sermons. Subtly, calmly, with resignation – as
an otherwise healthy spirit accepts his modern fate in the form of erotic
passion.”
Two decades later, Strindberg’s ideas about both acting and the nature
of the theatrical experience in general had changed drastically. By the
time The Father was revived at his own Intimate Theatre in Stockholm
in , he was essentially finished with naturalism. Instead, he urged
August Falck, who directed the production and also acted the Captain, to
stage the play in an abstract, simplified setting of dark drapes so that, in
his words, it would “be lifted out of its everyday atmosphere and become
tragedy in the grand style; the characters will be sublimated, ennobled,
and appear as from another world.” He also intended the acting to
develop this idea further: “The Father should be played as tragedy. Grand,
broad gestures, loud voices . . . let loose the passions.” Falck was having
none of this, however, and both photos of the Intima production and the
 film based on it confirm a style of staging and performance firmly
anchored in the naturalistic tradition. When the play finally reached
the stage at Dramaten in , the “appealingly quiet sadness” of Emil
Hillberg’s meditative interpretation of the Captain likewise harked back
to the playwright’s earlier vision of a rigorously subdued, unhistrionic
tone and atmosphere.
“Perhaps you know that I have no sympathy with the abstract,” Zola
had written in the letter to Strindberg about The Father. “I demand to
know everything about the characters’ positions in life so that one can
touch and perceive them, sense them in their own atmosphere.” Possibly
as a consequence of this letter, adherence to the Zolaist principles of dra-
matic character became more pronounced in Miss Julie (Fröken Julie) than
in any other Strindberg play. He himself considered this work “the first
naturalistic tragedy in Swedish drama” – “ ‘Ceci datera!’ = this play will
   -  
go down in the annals,” he added, with characteristic directness, in his
submission letter of August ,  to the publisher Karl Otto Bonnier.
In the long Preface, added for distribution to the patrons of the Théâtre
Libre in Paris in , he seems consciously to have set out to promulgate
the ideas of theatrical reform advocated by Zola and Antoine, director
of the French production. In so doing, he formulated what has since
come to be regarded as perhaps the clearest summary of the aims and
methods of the naturalistic style of theatre. In performance, Strindberg
wanted the spectator to experience the drama of the Midsummer Eve
seduction and suicide of the aristocratic protagonist as an unbroken slice
of living reality. In order for an audience to respond in this way, the
developing confrontation between Julie and her father’s valet Jean must
remain undisturbed by an intermission that would disrupt “the sugges-
tive influence of the dramatist–hypnotist.” To intensify the illusion of
reality further, the large kitchen in which the action takes place must be
fully three-dimensional, thereby eliminating “the effort of believing in
painted saucepans.” Yet at the same time, Strindberg describes a setting
that should be impressionistically conceived, with a use of asymmetry
that stimulates our imagination so that “we complete the picture our-
selves.” By advocating the elimination of footlights and heavy make-up
and by introducing strong side-lighting to accentuate eye and facial (i.e.,
psychological) expressiveness, he sought to create a close-up drama of
subtler reactions “mirrored more in the face than in gestures and sound.”
Following Antoine’s lead and often using his vocabulary, he called for the
actor to disregard the audience seated beyond the invisible fourth wall
and to perform within, rather than in front of, the setting/environment.
In this way each scene would be played in “that part of the stage the
action dictates.” I do not “dream of seeing the full back of an actor
throughout an important scene,” he writes, “but I do fervently wish that
vital scenes should not be performed next to the prompter’s box, as duets
designed to elicit applause.”
Although its views on theatrical production are largely restatements
of existing naturalistic theory, the dramaturgical arguments advanced in
the Preface to Miss Julie often combine aspects of the naturalistic aesthetic
with observations that point in a new, distinctly postnaturalistic direc-
tion. A complexity of motives – psychological, biological, environmental,
hereditary – customarily underlies the behaviour of a naturalistically con-
ceived character; yet the “split and vacillating” characters envisioned by
Strindberg – “conglomerations of past and present stages of culture, bits
out of books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, torn shreds of once
    
fine clothing now turned to rags” – are potentially Pirandellian in their
characterlessness. His advocacy of a meandering, non-sequential pat-
tern of dialogue, mirroring the randomness and casualness of everyday
conversation, anticipates the dialogue of free association in Chekhov’s
work. Not least, the allusions in the Preface to musical composition and
thematics become fully meaningful in Strindberg’s own dream plays and
chamber plays.
Strindberg conceived Miss Julie to be performed by a small experimen-
tal theatre. The founding of Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in  had sparked
widespread interest in the concept of a free, independent theatre as a
venue for trying out new plays and production methods. Strindberg, who
had entertained the notion of a theatre of his own as far back as , was
immediately attracted by Antoine’s model and approached the energetic
Ibsen champion August Lindberg with a proposal that they collaborate
to form an independent touring company. His sales pitch was as dynamic
as always: “You can’t go on for long with Ibsen; for he probably won’t
write much more, and his particular genre is on the way out . . . He can
do his thing, and we ours!” Strindberg’s proposal, contained in his long
letter of June , , was to start a small touring theatre devoted to a
repertory made up exclusively of his own works: “We’d never be short of
plays, for I can write a one-acter in two days,” he reassured Lindberg, to
whom all the leading male parts were to be tailored. Siri von Essen was
to have all the female leads – but, he adds, “if you want your wife along,
I’ll write one role for her and one for my wife, alternately, but always with
one for you!” His suggestions were meant to be as practical as possible:
“I shall write the plays so that it won’t be necessary to lug along any
costumes, sets, or props.” A revolution of the kind envisioned by Antoine
and his followers was not the ostensible objective of Strindberg’s under-
taking: “I have no dreams of transforming or reforming the theatre, for
that’s impossible. It can only be modernized a little!”
Nearly two years later, when Strindberg finally did succeed in estab-
lishing his own Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Denmark (where
he resided from late  to ), his venture survived only a week.
The small troupe of amateurs and professionals (notably Siri von Essen
and Hans Riber Hunderup) set up quarters in Dagmar Theatre, one of
Copenhagen’s leading private theatres. However, only a day before the
scheduled premiere of Miss Julie, the event that was to have launched the
enterprise, the public censor banned the play on account of its “daring”
subject matter. Undaunted, Strindberg’s experimental theatre quickly
changed plans, opening on the Dagmar stage one week later (March ,
   -  
) with a triple bill that included Creditors and two short pieces written
for the occasion, The Stronger (Den starkare) and Pariah (Paria). For practical
as well as artistic reasons, Strindberg created all three of these works as
performance texts for a small company with a minimum of technical and
financial resources. Creditors he described as “a naturalistic tragedy, better
than Miss Julie, with three characters, a table and two chairs, and no
sunrise.” This popular but perilously contrived three-hander was, how-
ever, no success when first attempted. Hunderup was a suitably cynical
and worldly Gustav, the vengeful ex-husband who exposes his former
wife’s inner ruthlessness and perfidy. But Adolf, the adoring spouse who
is felled by a stroke when he overhears their vicious confrontation, was too
much for the popular Danish writer Gustav Wied, who made his shaky
debut as an amateur actor in the role. “People laughed till they had tears
in their eyes as the small, slightly built author wriggled about like a worm
in a monstrosity of an armchair,” a reviewer for Vort Land declared. But
not all was lost for Strindberg’s little ensemble. His wife was very effective
as the talky Mrs. X in The Stronger, while Hunderup’s rendering of X, the
inadvertent murderer who outwits his would-be blackmailer in Pariah,
was a masterpiece that took its place in the regular Dagmar repertory.
As for Miss Julie itself, the ban on public performances compelled its
world premiere (March , ) to take place as a private showing for
 spectators, presented on a makeshift stage in the student union at
the University of Copenhagen. Siri Strindberg played a subdued Julie
opposite the polite Jean of Viggo Schiwe. “She is too cold, much too
cold, and one gets no impression at all of the kind of woman who would
seduce a man like Jean,” complained a correspondent for the Stockholm
daily Dagens Nyheter (March , ). This observer also found that
Schiwe “hardly suggested a servant; his manner was much more that of
a gentleman or a viveur.” Despite the primitive production conditions,
however, Strindberg’s demands for a credibly three-dimensional stage
environment appear to have been met. The setting “looked surprisingly
like a real kitchen,” admitted the critic for Dagens Nyheter. “A plate rack, a
kitchen table, a speaking tube to the floor above, a big stove with rows of
copper pots above it – in short, everything is there, presenting the living
image of an actual kitchen.” While much else in this play’s interpreta-
tion would change during the course of its long performance history, its
solidly representational setting – icon of the naturalistic belief in en-
vironment as a silent character in the drama – has usually remained
an indispensable feature of any revival. Not least in the  film of
Miss Julie made by Alf Sjöberg, one of the foremost directors of this play
    
in the theatre, Kristin’s kitchen stands as a vivid reminder of the power
of a naturalistically conceived environment as a symbolic force that is at
the same time a reality as tangible and practical as the stove on which
she fries Jean’s supper.
Although Miss Julie is probably still the play most commonly associated
with Strindberg’s name, the naturalistic revolution it helped to ferment
soon ceased to hold the playwright’s interest. Even by the time his work
had reached Paris and the Théâtre Libre in , Strindberg himself had
stopped writing plays altogether. Indeed, as Inga-Stina Ewbank observes
in an essay on his avid receptiveness to the influence of Shakespeare, his
career at that point “looked like that of a naturalist who, after The Father,
Miss Julie and Creditors, had written himself into a minimalist corner with
plays like The Stronger and then fallen silent. . . .” Yet, as Ewbank goes on
to point out, “possibly the outstanding Strindbergian characteristic is a
continuous growing and renewing, so that it is quite useless to speak of
his ‘formative’ years, since he was forever forming and re-forming his
art.” And so when he resumed his theatre work at the end of the century,
following the darkest time in his life, it was with a very different style of
performance and an entirely new kind of revolution in mind.