at the forefront of modern drama when he focuses on the theme of doubt and uncertainty in a world where truth is impossible to discern. The world of Strindberg’s drama is wrapped in lies and deceptions. Fathers do not know that their children are their own. Aristocracy and birthrights are called into question. Two false witnesses determine the truth in a court of law. People are never what they seem to be, and those who try to acknowledge the truth are declared insane. Strindberg also focused on two themes that would become predominant in modern drama: the notion that reality depends on one’s subjective perception and the idea that life is built on a series of illusions.

Stríndberg’s major drama can be classified into three major periods: his naturalistic period, his expressionistic period, and the period of his chamber plays. Discontented with the popular moralistic melodramas of his time, Strindberg created naturalistic dramas that probe the psyches of modern individuals. The motivations of his characters are complex, multiple, and usually concealed. Driven by psychological and sociological influences, his characters maintain a thin grasp on their identity and possess a fragmented sense of self. The conflict in his naturalistic dramas focuses on a few individuals battling for psychological domination. External action gives way to internal struggles in which one person subtly drives the other to his or her death in a form of psychological murder. The battle is most often played out in sexual warfare in which the woman, the weaker sex, drains the words and ideas from others and often destroys an intellectually superior male. These dramas have few characters, one setting, a short time span, and a singular thread of action. Strindberg also called for realistic acting, a functional set with real props, subtle makeup, stage lighting, and the elimination of the intermission.

After his Inferno crisis, Strindberg moved away from naturalism to expressionism and was again at the vanguard of creating new dramatic forms. His dream plays of this period are intensely personal journeys through the mind of a central consciousness. Character in these plays becomes even more unstable and fragmented. Just as in a dream, characters, reduced to types, split, multiply, and transform themselves so that one character may be seen in many guises. Time and place change at random as one scene fades into another. The structure is episodic, and similar actions recur in different forms. Dialogue varies between the cryptic and the poetic. Objects and people take on symbolic significance. In his expressionistic dream plays, Strindberg recast the medieval drama of sin and reconciliation into a modern psychodrama in which reality becomes a matter of subjective perception.

Late in his career, Strindberg experimented with a more intimate form of drama that he called chamber plays because of their resemblance to chamber music. In these plays, Strindberg returned to the short play with a small ensemble of characters. The form of the chamber play is tighter and more compressed than the expressionistic dream play. The plays are based on thematic movements rather than linear plots. They display a series of images juxtaposed and intertwined like the themes in a sonata. The plays focus on a world of discord, sin, guilt, retribution, and reconciliation. Their mood is somber and elegiac. Combining realistic scenes with grotesque symbolic images, they envelop the audience in a muted spectacle of sight and sound that borders on the surrealistic. They pave the way toward modern absurdist drama. Strindberg was a relentless experimenter who opened up new vistas for modern drama and influenced many of the great dramatists of the twentieth century.

The Father

First produced: Fadren, 1887 (first published, 1887; English translation, 1899)

Type of work: Play

Fighting for control of her child, a wife drives her husband to insanity and death by making him doubt that he is the child’s father.

The Father is often seen as a tragedy in which larger-than-life characters engage in a life-or-death struggle centered on a family conflict. Like a Greek tragedy, The Father has a tight plot structure, a narrow time frame of twenty-four hours, one locale, and a hint of the fatalistic forces at work behind the scenes. It has often been compared to the story of Agamemnon, who was trapped and killed by his wife Clytemnestra because he had sacrificed their daughter. The Father is also similar to Euripides’ Bakchai (405 b.c.e.;The Bacchae, 1781). In The Bacchae, Pentheus rejects the god Dionysus and his women worshipers the Maenads, only to be torn to pieces by them. In The Father, the Captain rejects feminine forces, both spiritual and physical. Thus, a household of women turns against him and figuratively tears him to pieces. An evil or fatalistic force seems to haunt the house. The Captain senses the web of fate that is being spun around him. His daughter, Bertha, hears maternal ghosts in the attic mourning over a cradle. Bertha’s grandmother, who is antagonistic to her father, warns her that spirits who are ignored seek vengeance.

The Father not only examines the battle of the sexes but questions the patriarchy, the male power structure, by casting doubts on paternity or fatherhood. The Captain wishes to assert his rights as father and husband. He tells his wife that when she married she bartered her rights in exchange for his financial support of her. Marriage, according to the societal order, is an exchange in which the woman agrees to be mastered in order to be supported. Thus, masculine law gives the father the sole right to determine the education of his child. Old Margaret, the Captain’s former nursemaid, argues that a mother has only her child, whereas the father has other pursuits. The Captain, however, insists that his burden is greater than his wife’s because he is responsible for the whole family.

The Captain, a military man who surrounds himself with symbols of masculine power (military tunics, rifles, game bags), represents the power of the patriarchy. However, the play questions the certainty of fatherhood itself. In the very first scene, the Captain tries to get one of his cavalry soldiers to accept the responsibility for impregnating one of the kitchen maids. Nojd admits to having slept with her but implies that there have been others, so that it is impossible to determine who is the father of the child. Nojd feels that it would be drudgery to support another man’s child. His wife, Laura, picks up this issue and notes that if fatherhood cannot be determined, how can the father have rights over the child? She says that she can prove that Bertha is not his child. The Captain, who has always held to his patriarchal privilege of passing on his soul to his child and obtaining immortality through his progeny, feels his power slipping away. The play begins to cast doubt on paternity. Johannson was forced to become the father of Old Margaret’s illegitimate child when he could not be certain that he was the father. The Captain implies that the wives of both the Pastor and the Doctor were unfaithful, thus questioning their paternity. Fatherhood is called into question, and with it, masculine power. Laura turns masculine law against the Captain by having him declared certifiably insane, thereby divesting him of his power. Since he claimed mastery as provider, she will now discard him and use his provisions.

If fatherhood is being questioned, motherhood is being elevated. The Captain, rejected by his mother, makes his wife his “second mother” and surrenders his will to her like a child. He keeps his old nursemaid with him and she treats him as her “big boy.” In the end, the nurse slips a straitjacket over him, pretending that she is dressing a little boy. As he is dying, he longs to lie on a mother’s breast. He puts his head down on the nurse’s lap, comparing her to the Virgin Mary, thus ironically replicating the Pietà, the body of Christ in Mary’s arms. The play ends with Bertha coming to Laura in the semblance of an ironic Madonna. Behind the personal tragedy, The Father encompasses a powerful social drama.

Miss Julie

First produced: Fröken Julie, 1889 (first published, 1888; English translation, 1912)

Type of work: Play

An aristocratic woman sleeps with her servant and commits suicide rather than face dishonor.

Miss Julie is not simply the tragedy of an aristocratic woman with a self-destructive personality and an ambivalent feeling toward men. It is also more than a naturalistic study about a victimized woman torn apart by family strife. Miss Julie, a drama of paradoxes and reversals, is about the breakdown of the social order. The play begins on the celebration of Midsummer’s Eve, a carnival-like festival allowing for the breakdown of social and sexual distinctions. Miss Julie, the lady of the house, would rather dance with the peasants than visit relatives with her father. Jean, her servant, is more concerned than the reckless Julie about propriety. In keeping with Midsummer’s Eve, Julie wants all rank laid aside and asks Jean to take off his servant’s livery. Julie and Jean then reverse roles. He drinks wine, she prefers beer; he is concerned about his reputation, she is negligent and foolhardy; he dreams of climbing, she dreams of falling.

In Miss Julie, aristocracy itself is a paradox. Jean fights to become a new aristocrat, but the aristocracy to which he aspires is a sham. Young ladies use foul language, their polished nails are dirty underneath, and their perfumed handkerchiefs are soiled. Miss Julie’s family title was obtained when a miller let his wife sleep with the king. Thus, the aristocratic title was earned through sexual corruption. Jean’s fiancé, Christine, who is not above thievery and fornication, cannot live in a house where the mistress sleeps with a servant. Jean, who realizes the hypocrisy behind aristocracy, is not beyond buying himself a bogus royal title. He cannot have Julie’s noble blood (which was gained by corrupt means), yet he can make their children nobility (by purchasing a less-than-reputable title). In Miss Julie, the authenticity of aristocracy is questioned.

In the midst of midsummer madness, not only are class barriers falling but gender distinctions are also becoming confused. Miss Julie’s father married a common woman; yet this common woman was given control of his estate. Another reversal of roles has occurred: The commoner ruled over the aristocrat. Julie’s mother also reversed gender roles and reared Julie to ride and hunt and to wear men’s clothes. Furthermore, she turned the whole estate into a carnival world in which the men did the women’s work and the women did the men’s work. When the father reexerted his control and restored order, she burned down the estate. He was then forced to borrow her money to rebuild, thus reversing the power structure again. The same ambiguous relationship between commoner and aristocrat is played out between Jean and Julie. Julie, the woman, makes her fiancés jump over whips like trained animals and delights in having Jean kiss her shoe. She becomes the seducer while he becomes nervous about his reputation. In his bedroom, she is the one who becomes sexually aggressive while he is the one who is shocked.

Banned by the censors, Miss Julie was produced at a private performance in Copenhagen in 1899, was later proclaimed a revolutionary naturalistic drama, and is now one of Strindberg’s most anthologized plays.

A Dream Play

First produced: Ett drömspel, 1907 (first published, 1902; English translation, 1912)

Type of work: Play

The daughter of the Hindu god Indra comes down to earth to discover that humanity is miserable and pitiable.

A Dream Play is an expressionistic drama built on a montage of scenes following the journey of a central character. The Daughter of Indra is a goddess who comes down to earth in the form of a beautiful woman to find out why humanity is so discontent. Like Christ, she experiences the pain of being human. At first, she is hopeful that love will conquer all, but after she listens to the anguished cries of humanity, experiences the pain of family life, and discovers that reform will always be stifled by the self-righteous, she can only look upon humanity with compassion. She finally realizes that human beings are creatures who hopelessly harbor spiritual aspirations but are held down by the weight of their fleshly existence. When she ascends back into the heavens, she throws her shoes into the fire of purification as she leaves a world of never-ending conflicts and contradictions.

The play is built around the disappointments and dreams of three men: an officer, an attorney, and a poet. The officer is a high-ranking military officer and teacher. As the action of the play progresses, he changes from a youthful, effervescent, well-groomed soldier to an aging, weary, unkempt derelict as he hopelessly spends a lifetime waiting for his dream lover, the opera singer Victoria. Restless and self-pitying, he is constantly irritated by the injustice and repetitiveness of life but continues to hold on to the romantic notion that love will cure all ills. When he rescues the Daughter of Indra from the drudgery of domestic life and takes her to Fairhaven, a romantic paradise, he lands in Foulstrand, a modern-day inferno, where he witnesses the everlasting misery of the human condition. In his constant failure to find true love, he represents disillusioned romanticism.

The attorney is disgruntled. Through his dealings with the crimes and viciousness of humanity, he has acquired a pale, haggard, and discolored face, along with blackened and bleeding hands. Denied his doctorate by the self-righteous academicians, he becomes a Christ figure who suffers rejection because he defends the poor and the helpless. More of a realist than the officer, he sees human beings as flawed creatures trapped between their commitments to odious duties and their desire for life’s elusive pleasures—pleasures that always result in recriminations. He marries the Daughter of Indra and enlightens her on the inhuman torments of living in poverty and the constant antagonisms of family life. Later, he continually reminds her of her sacred duty to her child.

The poet is an erratic visionary who bathes in mud in order to come down from the ethereal regions of lofty thought and to immerse himself in the dirt of life. Caked with mud, he is protected from the flies. Being both idealistic and cynical, he sees through life’s injustices and hypocrisies and rails against the gods. Though an earthbound creature hampered by his bodily existence, he still reaches for spiritual rejuvenation. When those around him are abandoning hope, he realizes that human redemption will only come through suffering and death.

In A Dream Play, Strindberg felt that he had created a new form. That form, later termed expressionism, was adopted by the German dramatists and became a trend in modern drama.

The Ghost Sonata

First produced: Spöksonaten, 1908 (first published, 1907; English translation, 1916)

Type of work: Play

A young student in search of a beautiful girl enters a house full of ghoulish characters and is surrounded by deception, guilt, and death.

In The Ghost Sonata, Strindberg paints a picture of a fallen world based on illusions and deceptions, where human beings, bound together by common guilt, are condemned to suffer for their sins. Only by escaping this world can one find peace and happiness. In this world, filled with death and decay, people are not what they seem to be. Under the veneer of respectability lies corruption.

The Ghost Sonata makes use of both spatial and temporal metaphors. Strindberg sees all humanity as linked by a common network of guilt and sin; the house that the student, an idealistic young man, seeks to enter becomes a symbol for humanity and the social system. The consul, the upper class, lives on the top level; the colonel, the middle class, lives on the ground level; and the superintendent, the lower class, lives below. The poor are found outside the house clamoring at the doors.

Hummel, an old man in a wheelchair, is old enough to know all the inhabitants of the house and understands how they are linked by a chain of guilt and betrayals. The consul (upper class) has slept with the superintendent’s wife (lower class); their daughter, the second generation, perpetuates the chain, for she is having an affair with the aristocrat (upper class), who is married to the consul’s daughter (upper class). The aristocrat links all the classes in their sins. He has married the consul’s daughter (upper class), slept with the colonel’s wife (middle class), and is having an affair with the Lady in Black, the daughter of the superintendent’s wife (lower class). Thus, all the generations and social classes are interconnected in a house of sin.

The play is also a journey. It begins on a sunny Sunday morning, with steamship bells announcing a voyage. The bright sunlight shines on the student’s dream house. As hidden sins are revealed and ominous pacts are planned, however, clouds appear; eventually it rains. As the student enters the house, the atmosphere becomes gloomy and claustrophobic. The mummy lives in the closest, and the ghost supper provides an eerie scene. As Hummel, who is trying to expose the inhabitants of the house, dies in a closet behind a death screen, the student symbolically invokes the light with his “Song of the Sun.” The hope soon proves futile, however, as the ogre cook is persecuting the young lady and draining the nourishment from her food. Finally, the young lady, bathed in radiant light, dies as the vision of the Isle of the Dead appears. Having begun on a Sunday with a Sunday’s child seeking resurrection from a night of death, the play ends in a transcendental vision of the dead. The subtle interplay of light and dark intertwines with the play’s themes.

In The Ghost Sonata, one can see how Strindberg’s work foreshadowed modern avant-garde theater. His drama is based on a series of images, not on a linear plot. Motivation is often ambiguous, and the nature of individual identity is questioned. Characters haunted by vague anxieties and grotesque visions are trapped in confined worlds where it is impossible to decipher the difference between truth and illusion. Language becomes an ineffectual means of communication, and often silence is all that is left. A relentless experimenter, Strindberg left a legacy that would influence dramatists such as Eugene O’Neill, Sean O’Casey, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who said, “Modern drama has come out of Strindberg: We have never gone beyond the second scene of The Ghost Sonata.”