SOURCE: Bark, Richard. “Strindberg's Dream Play Technique.” In Strindberg's Dramaturgy, edited by Göran Stockenström, pp. 98-106. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Bart explores Strindberg's use of the “dream play” technique.]

When Strindberg wrote his preface to A Dream Play, he called To Damascus (I) “his former dream play.” So in a sense the author has given his approval for us to call these two plays—and perhaps others, such as The Ghost Sonata—“dream plays,” bearing in mind that although they are different in character and technique, there are more things that unite them than separate them—above all a basic view of reality.

When To Damascus (I), A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata were first published, the critics discovered their “dream atmosphere.” Ever since then, scholars, professionals in the theater, readers, and spectators have tried to ascertain how Strindberg created this dream atmosphere in the text and how it could be portrayed on stage.

The term “dream play” already existed in Swedish (drömspel) as well as in German (Traumspiel) before Strindberg used it (although it did not exist in English and French), but in those days it meant only the presence of a dreamlike reality in a play. Strindberg seems to be the first one to have used it to designate a dramatic genre, and as such it is used in present-day English.

To experience reality as a dream is nothing unique for Strindberg. Human beings have done so throughout history. Even during his so-called naturalistic period, Strindberg could express such a concept. In a letter to the author Axel Lundegård, November 12, 1887, he wrote concerning The Father: “It seems to me as if I am walking in my sleep; as if fiction and life were blended. I do not know if The Father is fiction or if my life has been one; … Through much writing my life has become a life of shadows.”¹ It is easy to find paraphrases of these statements in A Dream Play. But the point here is that, when he wrote The Father, he did not depict reality as dreamlike. The fact that directors have tried to stage The Father and Miss Julie as dream plays is a different issue. It is after the Inferno crisis that the depiction of reality as dreamlike will become the dominant aspect of Strindberg's work.

A study of Strindberg's dream-play technique must start from an understanding of the author's experience of reality at the time of the Inferno crisis. In the books Inferno and Legends, it is obvious that he conceives reality as being like a dream. There is, of course, a basic level of fictional reality; he is walking on the street or sitting in a café when, suddenly or gradually, this reality is transformed into a dreamlike one. And all this is depicted with the same naturalistic means as before. In this way Strindberg remains a naturalist; the same view of reality that is expressed in Inferno and Legends is in his dream plays. Strindberg has never depicted a “real” sleeping dream in his plays (perhaps with the exception of the Alchemists' Banquet and the Inn scenes in To Damascus [II]). It is always reality that he depicts as dreamlike. And it is in this way that I use “dream play” in connection with plays, a term depicting a reality that is partly dreamlike, a reality that temporarily has the atmosphere of a dream.

It is true, however, that sleeping dreams have been staged from the very beginning of theatrical history—ever since the ghost of Clytemnestra appeared in front of the sleeping Furies in Aeschylus's The Eumenedies—not to mention dreams in the medieval mystery and miracle plays, in Shakespeare's dramas, in the baroque, the romantic, and the symbolistic theater.

There was a time when Strindberg was regarded as having been totally ignorant of the technical aspects of the theater. Nothing could be more wrong, as later research has proved. His writings about theater, his letters, and his discussions with directors and actors give the picture of a professional man of the theater. His plays themselves are the best proof of his theatrical knowledge, proof that he wrote them with the stage before his eyes.

When Strindberg was twenty years old, he tried to become an actor and was accepted as a pupil at The Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. Even though he did not have great success in this endeavor, he did have the opportunity to work as an extra in many Royal Opera productions, including Bjørnson's Maria Stuart i Skottland, Halm's Fäktaren från Ravenna (The Swordsman from Ravenna), Birch-Pfeiffer's Ladyn av Worsley-Hall, and such operas as Hérold's Zampa, Halévy's Judinnan (The Jewess), Rossini's Wilhelm Tell, Verdi's Ernani, and Meyerbeer's Afrikanskan (The African Woman). Meyerbeer's opera featured one of the most magnificent shipwrecks that had ever been put on a Swedish stage. Strindberg, with his sharp powers of observation, of course registered everything concerning the techniques of the stage. The fact that the changes of scenery in A Dream Play could be a problem, did not deter a theater professional who had actually seen the most advanced machinery.

Strindberg wrote his dream plays for a stage that perhaps did not exist at the time but that had existed when he was young. It was something he knew as well as his own writing desk—a stage that had been destroyed by realism and naturalism, by what he called “byggandet på scenen” (“building on stage” [i.e., realistic scene construction]), which created endless intermissions and made fast scenery changes impossible. Strindberg wrote for the elegant machinery of the baroque theater with its potential for “changements à vue,” which he himself had used in Lucky Per's Journey (written at the beginning of the 1880s).

It is misleading to say that it is the technique of the modern theater that has done full justice to Strindberg's later plays. They could have been produced in his time on a baroque stage with entertaining and astonishing effects. Of course, today such effects would seem old-fashioned and unsatisfying. But a production of A Dream Play at The Drottningholm Court Theater could, in the right hands, be a sensation in our time as well.

Many scholars have tried to explain how a dream atmosphere is created in Strindberg's dream plays—as literature and as stage productions. Most of them say the effect is created when something “dreamlike” is put into the text or staging. This is self-evident—if not a case of circular reasoning. Attempts have been made to characterize this dreamlike quality as distortion, immobility, slow motion, chiaroscuro, and soundlessness, and in addition as exaggerated rapidity, visual sharpness, and loudness—opposite characteristics! The dream effect, then, can be created through any means at all; it is the context that matters, the circumstances in which these techniques appear. With this in mind, the dreamlike effect could better be defined as a violation of time and space. Of course there must be some technique for creating dream atmosphere, but manipulating iconic elements—that is, elements that imitate an actual sleeping dream—may not be sufficient.

In Strindberg's dream plays there is always a sort of reality (fictitious, of course) established, but this reality is either suddenly or gradually transformed into a dreamlike one and then, in a permanent motion, returned to its original state. Sometimes “objective” reality and dreamlike reality appear simultaneously. The boundaries are impossible to draw. It is through special relationships, changes, and contrasts between these two levels, that the dream atmosphere is created, above all as it is expressed in the relation between the protagonist and his or her reality. Dream atmosphere is always created in contrast with the “reality” of the fictitious world of the play. I shall delineate these structures beginning with the protagonist, who may be confronted with a dreamlike reality as the spectator of a play-within-a-play, or perhaps drawn into it, becoming a dream character.

Strindberg is often regarded as one of the forerunners of expressionism and this is of course correct. But we must stop examining Strindberg in the light of expressionism as if he had been an expressionist himself, and instead emphasize how he is different, in order to discover his uniqueness. We cannot be content with regarding To Damascus (I) as a “drama of the soul” (which is the most important aspect of expressionism), acting in a “landscape of the soul,” a drama that takes place entirely inside the Stranger, who is the protagonist. In To Damascus (I) there is an objective reality and the presence of a higher power that intervenes and directs everything. (There is also a god in the background of A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata; in A Dream Play it is the god Indra, but he has already created the world once and for all and no longer intervenes.)

To Damascus (I) starts entirely realistically, but after a while dreamlike things begin to happen that have the effect of abolishing time and space. The Stranger is a kind of representative of reality throughout the play, increasingly tortured by fear. He looks at all these things as would a spectator of a dreamlike play-within-a-play. He exists on two levels: the real and the dreamlike. What he sees has an objective existence within the fiction of the play, but since we see these things partly through the eyes of the Stranger, we have the impression that we are looking into his soul. He also has visions and hallucinations, but they are never made visual or audible in the scenic dimension. There is a great difference between what the Stranger says that he experiences and what he is shown to experience (consider, for example, the vision in the Lady's crochet work and the sound of the grinding mill).

Let me mention some of these dreamlike plays-within-a-play, to which the Stranger is a spectator and which thereby take on a dream atmosphere. When he wants to give the Lady a new name, he shouts, “Fanfares!” and makes a gesture toward offstage; but instead of fanfares a funeral march is played. The Beggar has a scar similar to that of the Stranger, and when he learns that the Beggar, like himself, has received it from a close relative, he says: “No, now I am becoming afraid. May I feel if you are real?” and he touches the Beggar's arm and confirms, “Yes, he is real!” But the Beggar is still a sort of double—an evident violation of time and space. Then the six brown-clad pallbearers enter and, when the Stranger asks why they are mourning in brown and not in black, they answer that it is black, “but if Your Grace so commands, it will be brown to you.” At the Doctor's Home he is confronted with the so-called Werewolf (the Doctor, husband of the Lady); an arm and a leg of a corpse, which the Doctor pulls out of an icebox; and the Madman Caesar, who bears the name the Stranger had in school.

At the Hotel Room everything is quite different. Here the Stranger is no longer a spectator of a play-within-a-play. Both he and the Lady are trapped in a dreamlike situation—becoming, in a way, dream characters themselves.

In the Asylum scene the Stranger makes his most obvious appearance as a spectator of a dreamlike play-within-a-play. He is sitting at a table to the left, and at a table to the right there is a strange party:

The brown-clad pallbearers from the first act; the Beggar; a Woman in mourning with two children; a Woman, resembling the Lady but who is not the Lady, and who is crocheting instead of eating; a Man who resembles the Doctor but is not he; the Madman's double; the doubles of the Father and the Mother; the Brother's double; the Parents of the “Prodigal Son” and others. All are dressed in white but over their clothing is gauze in various colors. Their faces are waxen, deathly white; and their whole appearance and gestures are ghostlike.

These people also have an objective existence (within the fictitious world of the play) although here they abolish time and space. The Stranger has only to ask the inevitable question: “Are they actually like that?” and the Abbess answers: “If you mean are they real, yes, they're terrifyingly real.” In his next question he directly refers to the play-within-a-play: “Is it a play being performed?” Then the Confessor confuses everything even more—by introducing the doubles as actually being the characters they resemble.

After the Asylum, the scenes reappear in reversed order, and the dream atmosphere gradually disappears—as in an awakening.

In To Damascus (II) the structure is quite different—more similar to the one at the Hotel Room in part I. In part II the Stranger is outside the dream atmosphere only when he listens to the Doctor's speech while sitting on the bench of the accused; and when he sees his children, their new parents, the Doctor, and the Madman on the bridge. In all other cases he is drawn into a dreamlike situation and becomes a part of it, transformed into a dream character himself—for instance, at the Alchemist's Banquet and the Inn scenes, which he afterward refers to as a dream, an actual sleeping dream. It is obvious that here Strindberg is very close to expressionism, but it would be wrong to interpret all his dream plays on the basis of these scenes.

A Dream Play begins as pure baroque theater, when Indra's Daughter descends to earth in a cloud chariot. Although she comes from heaven, from a world of gods and myths, she functions as a representative of reality throughout the play—sometimes in company with the Officer, the Lawyer, or the Poet. She walks through the play as the spectator of many dreamlike plays-within-the-play, wherein time and space are abolished. The growing castle, for example, is situated on another level of reality, a violation of time and space. The Daughter and the Officer “then stop, frozen in their gestures and mime” and watch a scene in the parents' home. She takes the Doorkeeper's place in the theater corridor to “sit here and look at the children of man,” and she sees how the Officer is waiting for his beloved Victoria who never comes, and how he grows older and older—a dream character. She sees the world transform before her eyes: for example, a tree becomes a coat rack, which becomes a candelabra, while people on stage are frozen in their positions. In the Promotion scene in the church, the Lawyer enters a dreamlike situation and becomes a dream character when the Daughter, who actually remains outside, places the crown of thorns on his head. Although she is performing the crowning, she does not become a dream character. The levels are thus mixed.

In the room where a hellish marriage is enacted, the Daughter becomes a part of the dream level when she is nearly choked by Kristin's papering of the windows. We can also observe the people standing in the doorway as silent spectators of the scene.

At Foul Strand the Daughter again sees several strange people: a quarantine master, two patients exercising on some gym machinery, an old dandy in a wheelchair, an old coquette, her lover, a poet with a pail of mud, and a loving couple who have to go into quarantine. At Fair Haven she sees Ugly Edith, whom nobody wants to dance with but who achieves a moment of triumph by playing Bach on the piano. During the School scene, the Officer becomes a dream character when he cannot give the answer to two times two.

And after all this comes the Coal Heavers' scene—a totally realistic scene without any dream atmosphere, although the Daughter and the Lawyer are spectators during it. Here there is no violation of time and space (the shift to the Mediterranean is only mentioned in the stage directions) and the Coal Heavers are really not dream characters.

The drama concludes with a magnificent dreamlike play-within-a-play: the “defile,” where all the people in the drama enter offering their attributes to the fire, with the Daughter and the Poet as spectators. Finally, at the end of the play, the Poet alone remains a spectator while the Daughter enters the burning castle, returning to her father in heaven.

In The Ghost Sonata, the Student's role as a spectator is not as clear as those of the Stranger and the Daughter. In the first act, Hummel is a kind of lecturer and the Student a spectator, when, for example, the former describes the strange people in the house just as they become visible in the windows (as on an inner stage) and in the street: the Colonel, the statue of the Mummy, the Fiancée, the Caretaker's Wife, the Woman in Black, the Aristocrat, the Young Lady, the Dead Man, the Beggars, the Milkmaid.

In the second act in the round drawing room, the Mummy is introduced by the two servants as a character in a play-within-a-play while she sits in her wardrobe as on an inner stage, chattering like a parrot. The “ghosts” in the ghost supper constitute by their immobility and silence the dreamlike violation of time and space. But from the moment the Mummy stops time by stopping the clock, several levels of a dreamlike reality are introduced: the Milkmaid enters—seen only by Hummel—and at last he goes into the closet to hang himself, with all the other characters functioning as spectators.

In the third act in the hyacinth room, the Cook belongs to a dreamlike level: she stands in the doorway like a character in a play-within-a-play, with the Student and the Young Lady as spectators. The Student loses his temper and reveals all the rottenness in the house. His speech kills the Young Lady, who escapes into another world. She is joining the other ghosts, becoming a dreamlike character, while the Student is a spectator of her death and of the transformation of the hyacinth room into the Isle of the Dead—the final abolition of time and space.

I have exposed the structure of some of the dream play scenes in these three plays. In the history of their productions, one can see how directors have attempted to realize their two-layered structures. In the first productions—during the period of symbolist theater—directors tried to make everything on stage as dreamlike as possible while the spectators themselves were designated as dreamers of the plays. For the 1900 production of To Damascus (I), Grandinson and Grabow erected an extra stage (three steps high) on the main stage and framed it with an additional proscenium in the shape of an arch. In only one scene—the Asylum—was the Stranger (played by August Palme) represented as the spectator of a play-within-a-play, watching the doubles who were placed on an inner stage within an additional arch. For their production of A Dream Play (1907), Castegren and Grabow also used an extra proscenium in the shape of a poppy-arch, but this time it was not possible to remind the spectators of their role as dreamers. In The Ghost Sonata at Strindberg's Intimate Theater (1908), everything on stage was made to look like a dream, and the Student (played by Helge Wahlgren) was represented in a totally realistic way—a failed concept in most respects. In the Bernauer-Gade production of A Dream Play (1916), the stage was given an extra proscenium as well: a huge oval with a transparent veil, behind which everything was enacted within a fairy-tale framework, giving the audience the function of dreamers. Moreover, Indra's Daughter (played by Irene Triesch) was made a spectator of several plays-within-a-play, in which the Officer (played by Ludwig Hartau) was part of the most dreamlike of these. In Reinhardt's production of The Ghost Sonata (1916), the Student (played by Paul Hartmann) was a spectator of many plays-within-a-play, in which Hummel (played by Paul Wegener) appeared in the most dreamlike sequences.

Molander and Skawonius succeeded in making the settings for A Dream Play (1935) transformations of each other. The Daughter (played by Tora Teje) was often a dream-play spectator to scenes in which the Officer (played by Lars Hanson) portrayed a memorable dream character. In Molander's To Damascus (I) (1937), Lars Hanson created a protagonist who was fearful, wondering always whether or not he was dreaming. In Molander's The Ghost Sonata (1942), both the Student (played by Frank Sundström) and Hummel (played by Lars Hanson) were represented as “real” people—that is, spectators of plays-within-a-play—one of which, the ghost supper, at last engulfed Hummel.

In Ingmar Bergman's production of A Dream Play (1970), the drama was shown as a theatrical event that the Poet was creating while it took place on stage. The Poet, his creation, and the audience were all on the same level—as in Brecht's theatrical Verfremdung. Bergman was at that time not interested in creating the illusion of a dream, nor in creating any illusion at all. For his 1973 production of The Ghost Sonata, he perceived the play as Strindberg's dream and wanted gradually to penetrate deeper and deeper into the consciousness of the author. However, there was no clear expression of this intention in the production, other than an increasingly intense acting style. In Bergman's To Damascus (I) and (II) (1974) the Stranger (played by Jan-Olof Strandberg) was a part of the dream level, a character in sleeping dreams—“a mental landscape” created through an intensified expressionism in stage design and acting.²

Why so much fuss about dream atmosphere? Is it that important? I think so. If we exclude this effect from Strindberg's plays, we exclude a view of life: life as a dream—which I think is the basic aspect of the dream plays. If we can create a dream atmosphere on the stage of our minds, and in our theaters, we will gain the impression of a much truer reality, as if we were seeing behind the surface of illusion and reality into inner reality.

I have tired to demystify Strindberg and to show that dream atmosphere has nothing to do with imitation of sleeping dreams but that it relies on a particular scenic structure that is simple and practicable. Dream atmosphere is not achieved through exterior means or theatrical tricks (although they can help). It can be created in daylight in any space if the audience is made aware of this structure through visual means.

It is very difficult—if not impossible—to create a dream atmosphere in the theater if the director wants to depict actual sleeping dreams, but it is quite possible if reality is to be depicted as a dream, which is Strindberg's method. His dream atmosphere seems to build on the contrast between two levels: the transformation of reality into dreamlike reality and the relation between the protagonist and his or her world, in which he or she sometimes becomes a dream character in his or her own dream but ultimately is a spectator of a dreamlike play-within-a-play.

It is impossible to create an absolute illusion of reality on stage, but through the dream-play technique it is possible to create an absolute illusion of a dreamlike reality. Nobody in theater can deny that what is shown on stage really is a dreamlike reality—and this is perhaps Strindberg's greatest contribution to the history of drama and theater.

Notes

1. Letter from August Strindberg to Axel Lundegård, Nov. 12, 1887, in August Strindbergs Brev (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1958), 6:298. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

2. For more detailed information about these productions, see Richard Bark, Strindbergs drömspelsteknik—i drama och teater (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1981).