A Dream Play – August Strindberg, 1902 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★★½

When Sleep is not Rest

Genius and success often make strange bedfellows. For some artists, nothing can be more destructive than commercial or critical acclaim.

Consider August Strindberg. At the dawn of the 20^th century, he was seen by Europe’s intelligentsia as not only comparable to Shakespeare but, as Sean O’Casey exclaimed, “the greatest of them all.” Yet decades of naturalistic dramas left him burnt out. The more success he got, the more he hungered to do something more ambitious.

Thus came into being A Dream Play, one of the oddest works written for stage by a major playwright.

Strindberg explains this dilemma in the character of the Poet:

POET: To myself I have always seemed a deaf mute, and while the crowd was acclaiming my song, to me it seemed a jangle. And so, I was always ashamed when men paid me homage.

There are many moments like that where A Dream Play feels almost embarrassingly personal. Strindberg populates the cast with several Strindbergian personas of varying dark hues. One even appears in blackface, which makes the idea of staging A Dream Play even crazier now than it was then. But it was crazy enough then. When it first opened in Stockholm, it closed after only 12 performances and decades often passed between major stagings.

A scene from a 2012 staging of A Dream Play at the Stockbridge Theatre in New Hampshire. Many modern productions like this one use a modern adaptation by Caryl Churchill, as the play is notoriously difficult to realize. Image from https://www.tkapow.com/pastshows/dreamplay.html

The title offers a pretty good idea about what the play involves. On some heavenly plane, a daughter asks her god-like father what it is like to live among human beings. He abruptly sends her down to earth to find out.

The rest of the play reveals what she finds, but in a highly episodic way that unfolds like a dramatic version of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” You get a series of surrealistic set-pieces where different characters discuss with the daughter the futility and pain of being alive.

This can get tendentious, though Strindberg endeavors to keep the despair away with regular doses of absurdity and surprising humor:

BILLSTICKER: I haven’t much to complain of – not now I’ve got my net and a green fish box.

DAUGHTER: Does that make you happy?

BILLSTICKER: Yes, very happy. That was my dream when I was little, and now it’s come true. I’m all of fifty now, you know.

DAUGHTER: Fifty years for a fishnet and a box!

BILLSTICKER: A green box, a green one…

Harriet Bosse as the Daughter in costume for A Dream Play. Strindberg was inspired by Bosse to write the character and connected her to ancient Indian folklore because of her striking dark looks. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Bosse.

The daughter herself takes on different roles as the play unfolds. Strindberg wrote the part for his wife Harriet Bosse, and saw the play as an opportunity to unpack some of the emotional luggage he had acquired in what was by then a failing relationship.

For one who has read Strindberg’s The Father, it is surprising in a refreshing way to see how little of this comes in the form of “blaming-the-bitch.” Men are victimized by their desires and delusions this time around, not by the conscious designs of the women in their lives.

An Officer waits outside an opera house for his beloved Miss Victoria to come outside and meet him, turning grey while doing so. A Lawyer marries the daughter and sticks her in a stifling apartment. “Oh, it’s as if you are gluing up my mouth!” the daughter exclaims.

August Strindberg, late in life. A Dream Play was part of a burst of autumnal creativity that ended a long dry spell of plays. His mood was, if not happier, markedly more balanced and positive. His plays became more difficult, if less bleak. Image from http://radarcollective.com/people/mellan-kreativitet-och-darskap/.

Ultimately what Strindberg is driving at is twofold: A dramatic representation of his tortured inner life, stripped of self-pity; and a recreation of the fun-house-mirror world we experience in dreams.

The latter tack is where the play is most interesting and runs into the most difficulty. For writers, dreams are like a fuel supply, sometimes dark, sometimes fun, but usually only ever tapped indirectly. Here Strindberg puts a spotlight on how a dream might actually go down if it were mounted on stage, backlit, and given a large cast of players.

Everything changes on a dime. Sometimes this seems the only point:

ALL: She does not answer.

CHANCELLOR: Then stone her!

DAUGHTER: This is the answer.

CHANCELLOR: Listen! She is answering.

ALL: Stone her! She is answering.

While his plays before A Dream Play were hailed as masterpieces of naturalism, August Strindberg's paintings were more impressionistic and suggestive of what was to come. Above, his Packis i stranden [Ice Boulders On Shore] from 1892. Image from http://www.artnet.com/artists/august-strindberg/packis-i-stranden-fM_ZwNrf0uTkkq9LVzIsOg2.

A little of this goes farther than Strindberg seems to think. We get a fair amount of globe-trotting, and long sections of dialogue involving attention-demanding characters like “The Quarantine Master,” “The Elderly Fop,” “The Blind Man,” and “Ugly Edith,” all of whom come and go fast. Dreams do change colors and settings in an instant, but Strindberg’s gamesmanship makes it hard to follow the flow.

What passes for the main story is interesting when Strindberg spends time fleshing it out. The daughter’s situation is odd, as we initially see her visiting Earth as a kind of unattached angel. Once it became clear she was taking on various personas in different situations, and with different groups of people, I was drawn in by her range of experiences.

The Daughter (Malin Ek) contemplates a shawl as Aino Taube looks on in a 1970 production of A Dream Play directed by Ingmar Bergman. Bergman often cited Strindberg as the main influence of his art. Image from https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/universe/strindberg-bergman.

Her interactions with the Lawyer are the most interesting. She starts out his champion, angered that he is rejected by his community because he champions the unpopular. Later she becomes his bride and prisoner. Even as the Lawyer recognizes his unreasonableness, he can’t help himself from being more and more impossible to live with.

DAUGHTER: Are there no pleasant duties?

LAWYER: They become pleasant when they are done.

DAUGHTER: When they no longer exist. So duty is altogether unpleasant. What then can one enjoy?

LAWYER: What one enjoys is sin.

DAUGHTER: Sin?

LAWYER: Which is punished. Yes. If I enjoy myself one day, one evening, the next day I have a bad conscience and go through the torments of hell.

DAUGHTER: How strange!

A 2014 Chinese production of A Dream Play employs just seven actors on a set consisting of seven chairs. Little of this idea exists in Strindberg's original. Image from http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/866511.shtml.

Strindberg apparently saw himself as the Lawyer as well as the Poet and the Officer, the man who waits patiently outside the Opera House for a woman who never arrives. Apparently Strindberg found himself doing the same thing whenever Harriet had a show.

As a play, A Dream Play is more than a bit of a mess, hardly recommendable to someone who doesn’t consume drugs regularly. But it is a fascinating window on the life of one of drama’s most formidable greats. I don’t think this adds to his legacy very much, but it does anticipate the surreal plays of a later time and no doubt helped Strindberg exorcise some inner demons.