[In the following essay, Törnqvist examines Strindberg's one-act plays.]

Strindberg's international reputation as a dramatist is usually connected with two enterprises. Before the so-called Inferno Crisis in the mid-1890s, he was an eminent representative of naturalist drama. His famous preface to Fröken Julie [Miss Julie] is generally recognized along with Zola's Le Naturalisme au théâtre as its most important manifesto. After the Inferno Crisis, he penned his preexpressionist plays, in which the protagonists are more in conflict with themselves and with the Powers, as Strindberg termed them, than with each other. Both enterprises have been rather extensively researched.

Strindberg's two other notable contributions to modern drama have received considerably less attention and recognition. I refer to his cycle of plays about the Swedish royals—we would have to go to Shakespeare to find a counterpart—and to his commitment to the one-act play as a serious and independent form of drama, our concern at the moment.

One of the relatively few scholarly works devoted to the one-act play as a genre unequivocally states that “seit Strindbergs theoretischem Debüt von 1889 muss der Einakter als eigenständige Gattung gelten” (Schnetz, 24) [since Strindberg's theoretical debut in 1889, the one-act play must count as an independent genre].¹ Such a statement certainly invites more attention to Strindberg's one-act plays than has hitherto been bestowed on them.²

Schnetz speaks of the one-act play (der Einakter), not of the short play (das Kurzdrama). The distinction, although important, is rarely made. To qualify as a one-act play, I would suggest, a play must not contain any intermission, curtain, or black-out indicating a change of time and/or place. The “short play” or Kurzdrama is of another order. It is of course true that most one-act plays are fairly short, but their length, which is usually considered of great importance, is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether they are one-act plays. Thus Strindberg's Fröken Julie and Fordringsägare [Creditors], both plays that fill a whole evening, formally qualify as one-act plays, although Fröken Julie, with its intermediate “Ballet,” is arguably a disguised two-act play. Strindberg's Chamber Plays, on the other hand, whose performance time is about the same, do not qualify as one-act plays; lacking a unity of time and to some extent of place, they are divided into different parts separated by, one must assume, a curtain or a black-out.

According to this single, intersubjective criterion, Strindberg penned fourteen one-act plays. Of these, two—the verse drama I Rom [In Rome] and the historical play Den fredlöse [The Outlaw]—belong to Strindberg's earliest period, while the puppet play Kaspers fettisdag [Casper's Shrove Tuesday] is relatively late. The remaining eleven were all written between 1888 and 1892 during the playwright's so-called naturalist period. In the following, I shall limit myself to these eleven one-act plays of the middle period and focus on two of them: Den starkare and Inför döden [In the Face of Death].

When Schnetz speaks of Strindberg's debut as a theoretician in 1889, she refers to the article “Om modernt drama och modern teater” [“On Modern Drama and Modern Theater”] published in the Danish journal Ny jord.³ But Strindberg had, in fact, commented on the one-act form the year before. In his preface to Fröken Julie, he says:

Vad det tekniska i kompositionen angår, har jag på försök strukit aktindelningen. Detta emedan jag trott mig finna, att vår avtagande formåga av illusion möjligen skulle störas av mellanakter, under vilka åskådaren får tid att reflektera och därigenom undandrages författaren-magnetisörens suggestiva inflytande. … Min mening vore framdeles få en publik så uppfostrad att den kunde sitta ut ett helaftonsspektakel i en enda akt, men detta fordrar undersökningar först.

(Samlade Verk, 27: 109-10)

As for the technical aspects of composition, I have experimented with eliminating act divisions. The reason is that I believe our dwindling capacity for accepting illusion is possibly further disturbed by intermissions, during which the spectator has time to reflect and thereby escape the suggestive influence of the author-hypnotist. … My hope for the future is to so educate audiences that they can sit through a one-act play that lasts an entire evening. But this will require experimentation.

(Five Plays, 72-3)

The quotation suggests that Strindberg's interest in the one-act play is directly related to his ambition, as a naturalist playwright, to create maximal illusion.

In “Om modernt drama och modern teater,” he notes that the “new”—i.e. naturalist—drama pays more attention to character description than to plot, that the unities of time and place are observed, and that in “det betydelsefulla motivets uppsökande,” [“searching for the significant motif”], the playwrights focus on,

livets två poler, liv och död … kampen om makan, om existensmedlen, om äran, alla dessa strider, med deras slagfält, jämmerskri, sårade och döde, varunder man hörde den nya världsåskådningen om livet såsom kamp blåsa sina befruktande sunnanvindar.

Det var tragedier, sådana man icke sett förr; men de unga författarne … tycktes själva rygga för att påtruga sina lidanden på andra mera än nödigt var, och därför göra de pinan så kort som möjligt, låta smärtan rasa ut i en akt, stundom i en enda scen.

(Samlade skrifter, 17: 298-9)

life's two poles, life and death … the fight for the spouse, for the means of subsistence, for honor, all these struggles—with their battlefield cries of woe, wounded and dead during which one heard a new philosophy of life conceived as a struggle, blow its fertile winds from the south.

These were tragedies such as had not been seen before. The young authors … seemed reluctant to impose their suffering on others more than was absolutely necessary. Therefore, they made the suffering as brief as possible, let the pain pour forth in one act, sometimes in a single scene.

(Cole, 18-9)

Strindberg then sketches the history of the short one-act play, the quart d'heure, which he sees as the paradigmatic form for the presentation of modern man. At the same time, he regards “den utförda enaktaren” [“the fully executed one-act play”] as “det kommande dramats formule” [“the formula of the drama to come”]. Using Musset's proverbs as a model, one might, he declares, “[m]ed hjälp av ett bord och två stolar … få framställda de starkaste konflikter livet bjuder” [“by means of a table and two chairs … present the most powerful conflicts of life”], and this by resorting to “den moderna psykologiens upptäcter” (Samlade skrifter, 17: 301) [“the discoveries of modern psychology”] (Cole, 20-1).

At the time, Strindberg was strongly influenced by the so-called psychology of suggestion and was extremely anxious to be staged in Paris, where Zolaesque naturalism was en vogue. At the same time, he was trying to establish his Scandinavian Experimental Theater. These three facts explain why Strindberg precisely at this moment was so concerned with psychological, naturalistic one-act drama. As always, he desired to be abreast of the most recent developments, especially when they related to scientific achievements.

The demand of naturalism that staged events should mirror real ones is eminently fulfilled in the one-act play in the sense that unity of time and place are usually observed—so much so that the playing time (Germ. Spielzeit) often precisely corresponds with the scenic time (Germ. gespielte Zeit, the time assumed to pass between the raising and lowering of the curtain), a circumstance that does not occur in plays of more than one act.

Although Strindberg never became an out-and-out naturalist and definitely rejects what he calls petty naturalism, the eleven one-act plays he wrote between 1888 and 1892 may for want of a better label be considered naturalistic dramas. A congruence of playing time and scenic time characterizes Den starkare, Paria, and Första varningen: in all three the unity of place is also strictly observed. In Första varningen, Strindberg even alludes to this synchronism when, in the beginning, he has the Gentleman state that he is to leave in half an hour. The reason for observing these unities may well be a naturalist endeavor on Strindberg's part to heighten the slice-of-life character of these plays. Contrary to what is often assumed, Fröken Julie is in this respect less faithful to the requirements of naturalist verisimilitude. The drama is marked by a certain discrepancy between the playing time (around an hour and a half) and the scenic time (around twelve hours). But significantly the playwright disguises this discrepancy by having dancing peasants invade the kitchen midway through the play. The time seems extended, and there is no need for a curtain which means that the illusion of the spectator is never broken.

Given its brevity, the one-act play offers little possibility for varied description of characters and environment. The naturalistic emphasis on inherited traits and environment as determining factors is in many respects better suited to the narrative, as for example novel cycles like Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart, than to the concise and stylized form that the one-act play exemplifies. Here even the main characters tend to be types rather than individuals, and the limited scenic time prevents or at least obstructs the depiction of decisive mental changes. On the other hand, the fact that drama-in-performance by definition is a sensuous form presenting not by way of narration but in flesh and blood means that the drama in this sense concords better with the demands of naturalism than the epic. Yet this is more true of the play in several acts than of the one-act play. And in principle even more true of the modern equivalent of the nineteenth-century serial, the television soap opera. The one-act play, by contrast, lends itself to depicting parabolic situations. Here we deal not so much with people in conflict with each other as with man in conflict with an outward or inward fate. Existential and universal problems reign supreme.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in the studies devoted to the one-act play as genre, the naturalist one-act play has received only modest attention. While Schnetz focuses on the absurdist one-act play, Rudolf Halbritter discusses what he sees as the three main categories of the (Anglo-American) short play—the symbolist (Yeats), the epic-didactic (Wilder), and the grotesque (Pinter), and there are “vergleichweise wenige naturalistische und impressionistische Kurzdramen” (Halbritter, 28) [relatively few naturalistic and impressionistic short plays].

The question arises whether naturalism is inimical to the one-act form. If so, are Strindberg's “naturalist” one-act plays less faithful to naturalism than one generally assumes? Or, if we maintain that Strindberg's one-act plays are indeed naturalistic, do they represent a blind alley avoided by later playwrights? I believe there is something to be said for both. On one hand, Strindberg's one-act plays are more stylized and less naturalistic than usually thought. On the other, since the general trend in modern drama has been away from naturalism, we cannot expect any flourishing of this type of drama in plays intended for the stage, but rather in other media—radio, television. …

[I]n the lists of dramatis personae, Strindberg sometimes designates his characters by name, sometimes only by blood or other relationship (father, daughter, son-in-law), sometimes by profession, and sometimes by abstraction (Mr. X, Miss Y). The unavoidable conclusion is that the naturalistic Strindbergian one-act play is a protean phenomenon. Its homogeneity depends not so much on formal characteristics, as on thematic coherence—not surprisingly considering the author's own situation at the time, matrimonial relations stand central—coupled with an exceedingly dense dialogue, rich in subtext, and an almost cynical tone associated with the comédie rosse.

Strindberg's pioneering contribution is perhaps most noticeable in the shortest of his one-act plays, the monodrama Den starkare [The Stronger],⁴ where the author dramatizes the coincidental meeting between two actresses in a cafe on Christmas Eve. At the end of Mrs. X's long monologue—Miss Y does not say a word—it is clear that Miss Y has been, and perhaps still is, the mistress of Mrs. X's husband.

Den starkare can be classified as a combination of monologue and duo-drama. Miss Y's reactions are extremely important, since they both motivate and qualify Mrs. X's statements. But the monodrama form is not unproblematic. While the exposition in a normal play usually is handled by secondary characters, whose “objective” information often ironically contrasts with the versions of the main characters, in Den starkare the protagonist, Mrs. X, must provide the exposition herself. As a result she presents both factual information and subjective interpretation of this information. Indeed part of the play's suggestive power lies in the fact that it is so hard to separate the one from the other.

Impressed by the French quart d'heure plays, Strindberg wrote Den starkare for the Scandinavian Experimental Theater he had founded in November 1888. It is likely that he wrote both parts in the play for his wife Siri von Essen; in performances in Sweden Siri, who was a Swedish-speaking Finn, could do the speaking part; in performances in Denmark she could do the silent one. The fact that the little theater group consisted of both Swedish- and Danish-speaking actors may, in fact, have contributed to Strindberg's choice of the monodrama form. According to another hypothesis, Strindberg wrote Den starkare to demonstrate that the monologue need not be banished from naturalist drama (Strindbergs dramer, 4:7). In the preface to Fröken Julie he notes: “Monologen är nu av våra realister bannlyst såsom osannolik, men om jag motiverar den, får jag den sannolik, och kan således begagna den med fördel” (Samlade Verk, 27:110) [“Our realists today condemn the monologue as implausible, but if I motivate it, I can make it plausible and use it to advantage”] (Five Plays, 72). By including Miss Y in the play, Strindberg could motivate Mrs. X's long monologue from a naturalist tranche-de-vie point of view, despite the fact that Mrs. X at times seems to be thinking aloud rather than addressing Miss Y. Far from a shortcoming, these fluctuations between soliloquy and monologue add to the suggestiveness and psychological depth of the playlet.

What is the relationship between Strindberg's one-act play and those in more than one act? In his influential Theorie des modernen Dramas, Peter Szondi devotes a short chapter to the one-act play under the telling title “Rettungsversuche” [“Rescue Attempts”]. When a number of leading playwrights began to write one-act plays in the 1880s, it was, according to Szondi, a symptom that the traditional form of drama had by that time become so undramatic that it had become problematic. The one-act play is an attempt to replace the tension based on diluted interhuman conflicts with a tension outside human relations. Instead of a conflict between the characters, the one-act play offers an existential or metaphysical conflict between man and some force outside him which he cannot master: fate, providence, or, to use Strindberg's expression, the Powers.

The most obvious example of this transition from one type of conflict to another Szondi finds precisely in Strindberg's work. Both in the three-act Fadren [The Father] and the one-act Inför döden, he points out, the protagonist is haunted by satanic women. But while the Captain in Fadren has an obvious antagonist in his wife Laura, Durand in Inför döden, being a widower, no longer has an antagonist,

^[…] was Strindbergs Absage an die Intrige ausdrückt, zugleich die Annäherung des Einakters, der kein Geschehen mehr kennt, an die “analytische Technik”. Die “weibliche Hölle” bilden Herrn Durands Töchter, die ihre Mutter gegen ihn erzog. Sein Untergang droht aber nicht von ihnen, sondern von außen her: die Pension, die er leitet, steht vor dem Bankrott. Daraus spricht die Ersetzung des Zwischenmenschlichen durchs Objektive, die Umbergründung der dramatischen Spannung, die nun von der Situation und nicht mehr von der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Mensch und Mensch geschaffen wird. Freilich schildert Strindberg seinen Helden nicht in völliger Ohnmacht. Er entgeht dem Bankrott, indem er sein Haus anzündet und Gift nimmt, um seinen Töchtern mit der Versicherungssumme zum Wohlstand zu verhelfen. Aber die “Handlung” des Einakters ist keine Folge von Ereignissen, die in den Entschluß zum Selbstmord münden, auch nicht die seelische Entwicklung, die diesem vorausgeht, sondern die Exposition eines von Haß und Zwist unterhöhlten Familienlebens, die ibsensche Analyse einer unglücklichen Ehe, die im gespannten Raum der nahenden Katastrophe, auch ohne daß ihnen eine neue Handlung beigegeben würde, zu “dramatischer” Wirkung gelangen.

(Szondi, 94-5)

[…] a sign indicating Strindberg's renunciation of intrigue and, at the same time, the movement of the one-act, which no longer inscribes an event, toward the “analytical technique.” The “female hell” is created by Durand's daughters, who oppose him because their mother has raised them to do so. The threat of destruction does not come from them, however, but from outside his family: the pension that he manages is on the verge of bankruptcy. This shift corresponds to a displacement of the interpersonal by the objective, the refounding of dramatic tension, which will now be guaranteed by the situation rather than by a conflict between individuals. To be sure, Strindberg does not make his hero completely helpless. Durand escapes bankruptcy by setting fire to his house and taking poison so that his daughters can live comfortably from his insurance benefits. But the “action” of this one-act is not a series of incidents leading to his decision to kill himself or a portrayal of the psychological development that precedes this decision. Instead it is an exposition of family life undermined by hate and discord—an Ibsenesque analysis of an unhappy marriage, which, in the taut space of approaching catastrophe, achieves “dramatic” efficacy despite the absence of any additional new action.

(57)

Using Inför döden as a paradigm, Szondi sees the one-act play as one of many indications of the dedramatization and interiorization that is characteristic of modern drama and that constitutes its crisis. It is obvious that this view strongly contrasts with that of Strindberg. To him the one-act play, far from being dedramatized, is highly dramatic, since here everything unessential and distracting has been removed so that the fundamental opposition, what Strindberg terms the meaningful motif, is enacted. Szondi's and Strindberg's contrasting views represent two very different opinions of what dramatic tension or suspense actually means. While Strindberg is certainly anxious to demonstrate that the one-act play is a viable form within the framework of the naturalist aesthetic, Szondi is equally anxious to prove that it fits his overall idea that modern drama has become increasingly dedramatized and epic in nature.

An important question, in this context, is whether Szondi's description of Inför döden—this King Lear in miniature—is valid. The threat comes from outside, he writes; interhuman relations have been replaced by something extraneous. Such a characterization is, to put it mildly, a singular way of interpreting the play, determined, no doubt, by Szondi's need to make it fit his thesis about the problematic displacement of conflict in modern drama.

It is true that the bankruptcy of the pension fund constitutes an impending threat in the play, but two questions are of central importance: How did the bankruptcy come about and can the danger be avoided? In both cases, we deal with inter-human questions of guilt and responsibility. “Herr Durand,” Smedmark says, “står inför valet att leva och se döttrarna gå under eller att offra livet och låta brandförsäkringen ge dem en ny start” (Strindbergs dramer, 4: 242) [has the choice between staying alive and seeing his daughters perish or sacrificing his life and letting the fire insurance give them a new start]. Such an interpretation is correct except for the verb form: Durand does not have a choice, Szondi here could protest, he had a choice. When the play opens he has already decided to sacrifice himself.

The play is structured in such a way that in the first eight scenes the audience sees the daughters' accusations against Durand, partly based on the dead wife's will. Durand is said to have been a deserter during the Franco-Prussian war, to have left his job with the railway, and to have squandered his means on the house. Not until the ninth and final scene is the audience informed about the true state of affairs by Durand himself. Far from having deserted, he had on the contrary, volunteered to fight for his country, and his prodigal wife had squandered his means and forced him to leave his position with the railroad. Why then does Durand not protest against the unjust accusations? Strindberg provides a psychological explanation toward the end of the play when he has Durand, whose very name suggests his ability to endure, tell his eldest daughter:

Jag ville icke kasta in ofrid i era unga sinnen och komma er att tvivla på er mors förträfflighet, därför teg jag. Jag hade varit hennes korsdragare ett helt äkta samliv; bar alla hennes fel på min rygg, tog alla följderna av hennes misstag på mig, tills jag slutligen trodde mig vara den skyldige. Och hon var icke sen att tro sig först vara oförvitlig, sedan offret! “Skyll på mig”, brukade jag säga när hon riktigt invecklat sig i något trassel. Och hon skyllde! Och jag bar! Men ju mer hon kom i skuld till mig, dess mer hatade hon mig med hela tackskyldighetens gränslösa hat, och slutligen föraktade hon mig, för att stärka sig av inbillningen att hon narrat mig! Och sist lärde hon er förakta mig också, för hon behövde ett stöd i sin svaghet! … Och för er blev jag en stackare, när jag var god, ett kräk när jag var finkänslig, en usling när ni fick er vilja fram och ni ruinerat huset.

(Samlade Verk, 33: 178)

I didn't want to inflict anxiety and uneasiness on you young ones and cause you to doubt your mother's good character. … That is why I kept quiet! I had carried the cross for her throughout our whole married life. … I bore all the shortcomings and defects on my back, took upon me all the consequences of her mistakes—until, at last, I began to feel and believe that I was the guilty one. And it didn't take her long to come to the conclusion, first, that she was without blame, and, finally, that she was the victim! I used to say to her, whenever she had enmeshed herself in some serious muddle, “Blame it on me!” And she did! And I carried the brunt of the load and suffered for it! But, the more deeply she became indebted to me, the more she hated me with all the boundless hate of a debtor! And at last she began to nourish a contempt for me in order to strengthen the delusion within her that she had outwitted me! And, to top it all, she taught you to have contempt for me, too—for she needed support in her weakness! … And so I became nothing but a poor fool in your eyes whenever I did anything good, a miserable creature when I showed any sensibility, a base villain after you had managed to get the upper hand and finally ruined us all!

(One-Act Plays, 239)

We here get the picture of a man who was once active, but whose will was broken by his wife and daughters. Durand is, in fact, rather similar to the Captain in the closing scene of Fadren. In his sado-masochistic relation to his wife, he has come to play the role of scapegoat and martyr. After her death, this pattern has merely been strengthened for, as Durand himself points out, “Jag kan icke kära mot döda” (Samlade Verk, 33:177) [“I can't be the plaintiff against the dead”] (Strindberg's One-Act Plays, 238). And yet he plays precisely this role in an attempt to justify himself to his children before he dies.

From Durand's apology “in the face of death,” it appears that the question of guilt plays a decisive role. When his wife slipped, he took the blame. As a consequence, his wife came to be indebted to her husband. To free herself from this indebtedness, she projected her own faults onto him and persuaded herself and her daughters that he possessed qualities which, in fact, were her own.

Ironically, Durand's apology functions in a similar way. Intended to justify himself, it becomes an accusation against his wife. What Durand does not perceive is that he has himself been part of the game, that his masochistic leanings have nourished her sadistic tendencies and that the guilt therefore is reciprocal.

While this psychological web is consistent with naturalism, the symbolic overtones and the grotesque depiction of both characters and situation point forward to Strindberg's post-Inferno plays. The symbolic and anticipatory element is particularly important when Durand says, “husets ställning är så grundligt undergrävd sedan flera år tillbaka att jag hellre ser det ramla än jag dag och natt skall sväva i oro för vad som måste komma!” (Samlade Verk, 33: 160) [the position of the house has been so undermined that I would rather see it collapse than constantly worry about what is to happen]. The subtle nuances may seem slight but they are important since they alone provide a clear link with the end of the play when the house catches fire. The symbolism anticipates that of Ett drömspel [A Dream Play] and the Chamber Plays, which constantly present rotting, burning, collapsing houses. In Spöksonaten [The Ghost Sonata], we journey from the House of Life to the Isle of the Dead, Toteninsel. In Pelikanen [The Pelican], the House of Life burns and makes room for a paradisiac vision of death. The heat from the fire that is to annihilate brother and sister brings about the final ecstatic line: “Nu börjar sommarlovet!” (Samlade Verk, 58: 297) [Now summer vacation begins!].

In the opening of Inför döden, the stage directions indicate that Durand “står med kikare i handen och ser utåt sjön” [“stands looking out across the lake through a pair of binoculars.”] Over “topparne av kyrkogårdens cypresser” [“the tops of the churchyard cypresses”], he can see “Lac Leman med Savoyer-Alperna och franska badorten Évian” (Samlade Verk, 33, 154-5) [“Lake Leman with the Savoyard Alps and the French bathing resort Évian”] (One-Act Plays, 225). Durand here finds himself in a borderland. On the other side of the lake, he can see the country he has left: France—his own past. On this side of the lake he can see the churchyard, where he will soon be resting. With death close at hand, the landscape becomes richly symbolic. If the churchyard represents death, the cleansing—purging—Évian and above and beyond it, we may assume, the white, snow-covered mountains are actually a naturalistic version of the paradisiac “Isle of the Dead” appearing at the end of Spöksonaten. There he stands, Durand, searching the wind that will soon help demolish his house. Here, as in the late plays, we ultimately experience the House of Life that must be destroyed to make room for another, better existence. And Durand is, in the last instance, a representative of Man, “född till världen mitt i ett konkursbo” (Samlade Verk, 58: 167) [born into the world in the midst of a bankruptcy] as is said of the Student in Spöksonaten.

As my examination of this one-act play demonstrates, Szondi's thesis that the interaction in Fadren, in Inför döden has been replaced by a suspense based on an outward threat is dubious. The outward threat, the bankruptcy, is the result of a web of guilt that cannot be untangled and, therefore, takes on metaphysical proportions. Szondi is certainly right in noting that most of the decisive events in the one-act play belong to the prescenic action—to what has already happened when the curtain is raised—while in the three-act play some of the decisive events belong also to the staged action. But this difference is merely gradual, motivated largely by the shorter length of the one-act play. More striking than the differences between Fadren and Inför döden are the similarities. Thematically both plays anticipate the post-Inferno dramas.

With his eleven naturalist one-act plays, Strindberg created the basis for a genre that has proved exceedingly vital ever since. Not only have one-act plays for various reasons, not least economic ones, been relished by small theater groups, but new media—radio and television—also have meant an increasing demand for short plays. If Strindberg's kind of one-act play has been somewhat out of tune with the development of modern stage drama, it has certainly proved exceedingly suitable for the new media.

Next to Fröken Julie, Den starkare appears to have been the most important of Strindberg's one-act plays.⁵ It inspired Eugene O'Neill to an early monodrama, Before Breakfast; Ingmar Bergman to one of his most important films, Persona;⁶ Per Olov Enquist to his “counterdrama” Tribadernas natt [The Night of the Tribades], the most successful Swedish play after Strindberg; and Ljoedmila Petroesjevskaja to her recent A Glass of Water. Its reverberations can be sensed also in Herman Heijermans's Dutch piece Verveling [Boredom], in Jean Cocteau's La Voix humaine, and in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. Rarely, if ever, has such a short play had such an impact.

Notes

1. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are by the author.

2. The exception is, of course, Fröken Julie, which has been rather thoroughly researched. Apart from Martin Lamm's basic survey in Strindbergs dramer, Børge Gedsø Madsen's dissertation, Strindberg's Naturalistic Theatre: Its Relation to French Naturalism may be mentioned. Barry Jacobs is responsible for a suggestive introduction in Strindberg's One-Act Plays. Första varningen [The First Warning] and Den starkare [The Stronger] are analyzed by Egil Törnqvist in his Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure, and Paria [Pariah] in his “The Modern(ist) One-Act Play,” in Facets of European Modernism: Essays in Honour of James McFarlane. Leka med elden [Playing with Fire], finally, is dealt with in Hans-Göran Ekman's “Strindberg's Leka med elden as Comedy,” in Strindbergs Dramen im Lichte neuerer Methoden-diskussionen.

3. The article is reprinted in August Strindberg, Samlade skrifter, vols. 17, 281-305.

4. For an examination of the monodrama form, see Törnqvist, “Monodrama: Term and Reality,” and Paul.

5. For the impact of Fröken Julie, see Egil Törnqvist and Barry Jacobs, Strindberg's ‘Miss Julie’: A Play and its Transpositions. Norwich: Norvik Press, 1988: 114-35.

6. To date Bergman has produced four of Strindberg's one-act plays: Leka med elden (twice), Första varningen, Moderskärlek, and Fröken Julie (twice). There is a striking resemblance between Leka med elden and Bergman's film Sommarnattens leende [Smiles of a Summer Night]. The similarity between Den starkare and Bergman's film Persona has often been pointed out.

Works Cited

Cole, Toby, ed, Playwrights on Playwriting. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960.

Ekman, Hans-Göran. “Leka med elden as Comedy,” Strindbergs Dramen im Lichte neuerer Methoden-diskussionen. Beiträge zur nordischen Philologie 2. Basel: Helbing und Lichtenhahn, 1981.

Halbritter, Rudolf. Konzeptionsformen des modernen anglo-amerikanischen Kurzdramas. Palaestra 263. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975.

Jacobs, Barry. “Introduction” to Strindberg's One-Act Plays. Trans. Arvid Paulson. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969.

Lamm, Martin. Strindbergs dramer. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1924.

Madsen, Børge Gedsø. Strindberg's Naturalistic Theater: Its Relation to French Naturalism. Seattle: U Washington P, 1962.

Paul, Fritz. “Strindberg og monodramaet.” Edda, 5, 1976.

Schnetz, Diemut. Der moderne Einakter: Eine poetologische Untersuchung. Bern: Francke, 1967.

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