Easter – August Strindberg, 1901 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★★★

Strindberg Does 'Porch Pals'

Here’s a happy, heartwarming story about a family under siege featuring a bitter man, his deluded mother, a sister who talks to God, and a straying fiancée; all threatened by an angry town and a creditor who could take their house at any moment.

And no, I’m not being sarcastic about that “happy, heartwarming” part, even if it is a play by that most dour of dramatists, August Strindberg.

Was Strindberg deliberately playing against expectations? Was he subtly sending up the already dated conventions of middle-class Swedish Lutheranism? Or was he completely on the level?

That said, the play starts on a note you expect, and a response you don’t:

ELIS: I seem to have fallen from grace.

KRISTINA: It is a sign of grace to suffer when you are innocent. Don’t be tempted to impatience. Stand the test – for this is only a test. I feel sure of it. [Act One]

Elis Heyst is a young man who struggles with the double burden of an unrewarding teaching position and living with the scandal of a crooked father. Now the old man’s in jail on multiple embezzlement charges, and Elis is sweating when the man holding much of the paper on Papa, the shadowy Lindkvist, comes to collect.

Meanwhile, Easter is coming, and across diminishing winter shadows – through the verandah windows where the entire play is set – all is about to change. Elis fears what that will be:

ELIS: The snow lies in the streets like the straw they spread outside the houses of the dying. Every sound is blotted out – except for the deep notes of the organ, which one can catch even in here. [Act Two]

The set of Easter is dominated by imposing verandah windows, as seen in this design for a 1979 production by the Norwegian Touring Theatre. Image from https://sceneweb.no/en/production/35777/Easter-1979-9-19 

Can he learn the lesson of Easter, of Christ’s passion and the salvation of mankind? Can he learn to be humble, not just in accepting his fate but embracing it? In a town full of apparent adversaries, is Elis’ only true antagonist his own bloated ego?

Shaky sister Eleanora is Easter’s source of celestial wisdom: “The whole of life is frightful – but we have to accept it all the same.”

The play is worth reading this time of year, with the spring equinox weeks away. As a drama, it feels thin, and its characters resonate less as people than as ideas. But give August Strindberg credit for shaking things up.

Remember that old episode of “The Simpsons” when Marge complains about too much cartoon violence, and rallies her community to force changes in “The Itchy And Scratchy Show”? So instead of beating Scratchy to death with a croquet mallet, Itchy shares a pitcher of lemonade with the feline while the two sit on a porch together. Easter plays like that.

Noting this dislocation could be a spoiler, but it’s mentioned by translator Elizabeth Sprigge in an introductory piece she wrote in 1949. Sprigge calls Easter one of Strindberg’s most popular plays in Europe, precisely for the way it plays against type:

…Nor in this modern Mystery or Morality Play is there any of the grim tragedy found in many of Strindberg’s dramas. It is tender, sensitive and has a haunting quality of goodness.

There are many portraits of Strindberg; I selected this one by Władysław Ślewiński because it seems less dour and more enigmatic, on par with the Strindberg who greets us in Easter. It was painted five years before Easter's publication. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Strindberg.

That overstates the positivity of the mood, quite bleak through most of Acts One and Two. But the haunting quality of goodness is definitely there, and marks quite a shift from the domestic power trips practiced so nastily in his earlier works Miss Julie, The Father, and The Stronger.

Elis may be Easter’s authorial stand-in, but Eleanora carries its core message of hope and faith. Her religion is both personal and deeply felt:

BENJAMIN: [Boyishly] Are you religious?

ELEANORA: Yes, I am religious.

BENJAMIN: Really? A believer, I mean?

ELEANORA: Yes, that’s what I mean. So if you say anything bad about God, who is my friend, I won’t sit at the same table with you. [Act One]

The parts are the same, but the names were changed in a 2013 U. S. adaptation of Easter that moved the story from the Swedish town of Lund to a black neighborhood in Harlem a half-century later. Nathan James is the son, Carol Carter his mother, and Chudney Sykes the son's fiancee. Image from https://www.newyorkled.com/___Blog/easter-by-august-strindberg-presented-at-gene-frankel-theatre/.

Her father may be the embezzler, but Eleanora senses the crime is her own, apparently drawing upon her understanding of original sin. She spends much of the play fearing discovery of her apparent theft of a daffodil from a local flower shop, a device which is developed along the length of the play as a matter of great importance, causing the local merchants to lock up their stores and giving the Heyst family more reason to fear a knock at the door.

Benjamin, who happens to be one of those burned by Papa Heyst’s embezzlement but who has fallen in love with Eleanora anyway, pleads with her to make things right with the flower shop and avoid arrest: 

BENJAMIN: You’re just like a lamb going to the slaughter.

ELEANORA: When it knows it has to be slaughtered it doesn’t complain, or try to run away. There’s nothing it can do. [Act Three]

Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse played Eleanora in Easter's 1901 premiere. Strindberg was so smitten by her that he asked her to have his baby. She agreed and they soon married - and soon after broke up. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Bosse. 

The drama does feel overblown as characters talk on portentously about how heavy their clothes feel, how dark the skies are, etc. Elis’ manner is that of a real pill, though it’s clear as the play goes on that this is subversive casting from Strindberg. Unlike the title character in The Father, whose paranoia is validated in the end, Elis is forced to reckon with the idea that not everyone is as bad as he’d like to believe:

LINDKVIST: You can’t rely on human nature, any more than on the nature of matter or of thought. Peter was faithless. I don’t deny it – and I don’t defend him. Not on that point. But the human heart is fathomless – it has layers of gold – and dross. Peter was a faithless friend, but a friend all the same.

The fact the speaker at this moment has been dressed up through the rest of the play as an unseen nemesis strikes home Strindberg’s point: You can’t assume badness in people just because you don’t like them.

The whole Peter subplot is one of several things floated for a while and then dropped. He is a rival of Elis who at one point takes Elis’ fiancée Kristina to a party. Kristina has been telling Elis to bear up to life tests for most of the play, then puts him to the test herself by pushing his jealousy button. Does it make sense? Should I mind that it doesn’t?

A Swedish first edition of Easter from 1901 depicts many symbols from the play, including a daffodil, a crown of thorns, and a birch of penance. Image from https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2015/04/hope-humanity-and-humour.html.

Strindberg was a master of realism, but Easter adds a touch of the fantastic, shadows appearing ghostlike behind windows at various points and even talk about a clock that took to interrupting Elis’ piano lessons. “It couldn’t bear music,” Eleanora explains. “It was so naughty.”

Easter is most interesting perhaps for the look it gives us at Strindberg the author, licking his wounds late in life and taking stock. Set in the southern Swedish college town of Lund, which the northerner Strindberg apparently hated, the play presents a reckoning of sorts between a rebel artist and a society he despises but needs somehow.

Does it work? Well, like the “Itchy & Scratchy” producer said to Marge: “It’s different, I’ll give you that.” Sometimes Easter is touching, sometimes unconvincing, occasionally goofy, but it is intriguing all the way through, which counts for something.