[Below, Jenkins reviews a production of The Ghost Sonata performed at the National Theater in Oslo by the Royal Dramatic Theater of Sweden and directed by Ingmar Bergman.]

“We are bound to each other by crimes and secrets and guilt,” confesses one of the tormented characters in August Strindberg's Ghost Sonata. This web of anguish is a constant invisible presence throughout Ingmar Bergman's stark production of the Swedish play that opens on Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Although the characters often inhabit isolated areas of a mostly empty stage, their aching silences make it clear that they will never free themselves from the painful threads of memory that link them to one another's fates.

Seen at the National Theater in Oslo during a recent visit by the Royal Dramatic Theater of Sweden, The Ghost Sonata offers audiences a glimpse of Mr. Bergman's cinematic imagination grappling with the dramatic complexities of a Swedish playwright who was often viewed as mad: characters watch one another from odd angles of the stage, like voyeurs screening one another's most intimate actions through the distorted lenses of their longings. The five performances at the Harvey Theater at the academy—in Swedish with simultaneous translation through headsets—are part of an arrangement between the academy and the Royal Dramatic Theater of Sweden, known as Dramaten, which has already brought eight other Bergman productions to Brooklyn. The most recent was The Image Makers in 1999.

The central figure in Strindberg's story is Jacob Hummel, a bald, ghoulish old man who scurries across the stage on crutches like a four-legged insect stalking its prey. Even when he sits in his wheelchair at the center of the stage, Hummel's words are punctuated with audible intakes of breath that seem to suck the people around him closer to his venemous sphere of influence.

As interpreted by Mr. Bergman, Strindberg's plot unfolds according to an intricate geometry of pain. The fiancee who was jilted by Hummel when he was young sits knitting in a corner of the stage under the shadow of a relentlessly ticking grandfather clock. Time and sadness have left their marks on her wrinkled face, but she still waves like a flirtatious teenager whenever Hummel looks in her direction. In another corner, a gray-haired Colonel stares forlornly at a bare-breasted statue of his wife, Amelia, which captures her youthful beauty before she was seduced by Hummel (in revenge for the Colonel's illicit liaison with Hummel's fiancee) and gave birth to his child, a daughter that the Colonel has raised as if she were his own.

To underscore the poisoned feelings that connect all these characters, Mr. Bergman adds an ironic piece of stage business. A cleaning woman empties a chamber pot into a trap door below the stage, suggesting the presence of an underground sewer running beneath everyone's feet that feeds the subterranean fountain (beneath another trap door on the opposite side of the stage) from which a young student, whose father had been bankrupted by Hummel, took a drink in the play's opening moments. A beautiful milkmaid, who turns out to be the ghost of a girl murdered by Hummel, rinsed the student's eyes with water from the fountain, a prelude to his deeper involvement in Hummel's filthy affairs.

This is the fourth time that Mr. Bergman, who is 82, has directed The Ghost Sonata, a text that has often been criticized as unstageable. In 1924, when Eugene O'Neill chose the play as the inaugural production for his now legendary Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village, the New York Times critic Alexander Woollcott dismissed its characters as “sickly phantasies” in “strange garb.” For years after the play's premiere in 1907, even Strindberg's countrymen had a difficult time digesting a play in which metaphysical and physical realities coexist without regard for the rules of naturalism that prevailed in an era when the work of Henrik Ibsen dominated Europe's stages.

In 1941 Mr. Bergman's amateur staging of The Ghost Sonata marked the first time the play had been produced in Stockholm since its debut 34 years earlier.

While Mr. Bergman's reputation in America is based primarily on his films, he has enjoyed a distinguished career as a stage director throughout Europe, and the two playwrights he returns to most often are his fellow Scandinavians, Strindberg and Ibsen. He explained why in an interview quoted by the Bergman scholars Frederick J. Marker and Lisa Lone-Marker in their book Ingmar Bergman: Four Decades in the Theater. Speaking about his landmark 1982 production of Strindberg's Miss Julie, Mr. Bergman said: “To me, the most fascinating thing about Strindberg is that enormous awareness that everything in life, at every moment, is completely amoral, completely open. … With Ibsen you always have the feeling of limits, because Ibsen places them there himself. … He points the audience in the direction he wants it to go, closing doors, leaving no other alternatives. With Strindberg, as with Shakespeare, you always have the feeling that there are no such limits.”

The director's admiration for Strindberg's free-spirited dramaturgy is linked to his affinity for the musicality of the playwright's language. “With Strindberg, you never run into difficulties,” Mr. Bergman has noted, “because you can hear his way of breathing—you can feel his pulse rate—you know exactly how it's meant to work. Then all you have to do is recreate that rhythm.”

Mr. Bergman's actors respond to the music of Strindberg's language not only with words but also with silences, gestures and extra-textual vocalizations. The most startling sounds come from the mouth of Gunnel Lindblom, an actress who has worked with Mr. Bergman over many years and who appeared in his films The Seventh Seal (1956), The Virgin Spring (1960) and The Silence (1963).

In The Ghost Sonata, Ms. Lindblom plays the aging Amelia, who has lived for 20 years in the dining room closet, wasting away into a caricature of the beauty her husband and Hummel still worship when they gaze at her statue. When she is in the closet, Amelia emits comic squawks and cackles like the family's oversized pet parrot—at one point she whistles a tune that sounds like an aria from “Carmen”—but her true nature is revealed when she emerges from behind the closet door to interrupt Hummel's romantic reverie with her statue. She wears a tattered gown the color of dried blood that seems to have deteriorated into a shroud of graying spider webs. At first her high-pitched squeals mock the amorous ravings of Hummel, who is caressing her statue unaware that the woman who was once the flesh and blood object of his desire is behind him. Then Amelia begins to coo, nestling her head against Hummel's chest like an attention-starved pigeon. But ultimately, overwhelmed by her anger at his betrayal, she shrieks and flails at him like a wild harpy.

The shifting tones in the battles between the sexes are matched by equally polyphonic and grotesque depictions of class warfare. Strindberg, who died in 1912, was obsessed with class distinctions and spoke often of the “slave blood” of his mother, an exaggerated reference to her lower-class background.

Orjan Ramberg's portrayal of Hummel's servant Johansson seems to be a model of slinky subservience in which he literally bends to every whim of his master, but in the end it is Johansson who straightens his spine and throws Hummel into the closet from which Amelia has escaped. Hummel's path to destruction is paved by the Colonel's butler, Bengtsson, another servant who shifts from a pretense of obedience to outright defiance. In one of Mr. Bergman's minor alterations of Strindberg's text, the director accentuates the theme of class warfare by having Bengtsson join the cook in laughing derisively at the daughter of their mistress and the student who is wooing her. “You sup on us while we sup on you,” they jeer.

The family cook is the embodiment of what Strindberg called “psychic murder,” a crime that recurs throughout the play as the leitmotif of Strindberg's theatrical sonata. A sort of culinary vampire, the cook sucks out the nourishment from the family's food before she feeds it to them, a variation on the technique by which the other characters suck the life out of one another by verbally stripping others of their identities. The most comical demonstration of this occurs when Hummel removes the Colonel's wig, false teeth and military jacket, reducing him to a shriveled-up babbling fraud. The opera buffo is repeated again in a tragic key when Hummel himself has the life sucked out of him after Amelia and Bengtsson reveal the truth about his past.

The Expressionistic techniques pioneered in Strindberg's Ghost Sonata helped set the stage for many 20th-century avant-garde theatrical movements, from the theater of the absurd to the theater of cruelty. Like A Dream Play (seen at the academy last November in a production by the Stockholm Stadsteater, directed, designed and lighted by Robert Wilson) and Strindberg's other so-called post-Inferno plays, The Ghost Sonata was written in 1907 after the author had suffered a series of psychotic incidents that left him unwilling to return to writing the naturalistic dramas that had made his reputation.

Instead, Strindberg wrote hallucinatory plays that offered a mix of psychological insight and mystical philosophy. (The working title for The Ghost Sonata was Loka Kama, a term used in Buddhist teachings to refer to an illusory “place of desire.”) Strindberg believed that his metaphysical approach could reveal aspects of human nature that were more real than the ostensibly realistic plays championed by his contemporaries. In the program notes for the play's Provincetown Playhouse production, O'Neill called Strindberg's technique “hyper-naturalism” and hailed him as “the precursor of all modernity in our present theater.”

Ibsen, sometimes viewed as the father of modern naturalistic drama, was obsessed with Strindberg, whose new style posed a challenge to his own. When Mr. Bergman's Ghost Sonata was in Oslo, the theater turned out to be only a few blocks from Ibsen's home. The Swedish actors went to visit the room where the Norwegian author wrote his last play in 1905 and told their guide that Mr. Bergman's next production would be a play by Ibsen. Hanging on the wall behind Ibsen's desk was a huge portrait of Strindberg that inspired Ibsen's famous assessment of his Swedish rival: “I can't write a word without that madman staring down at me with his insane eyes,” a sentiment that would be shared by modern playwrights for decades.