Strindberg on Drama and Theatre

207 Pages·2008·9.58 MB·English

by  Egil Tornqvist

Sweden’s August Strindberg (1849-1912) has long been recognized as one of the e
g
leading dramatists around the turn of the last century. A restless innovator of various
i
l
drama forms, he has proved extremely seminal to the development of modern
t
drama. Strindberg frequently commented on drama and theatre in general, and ö
r e
on his own plays and their staging in particular. This book presents the most
n n
important of these comments, chronologically assembled and annotated, many of q e
v e
them for the first time in an English translation.
i t
s
Strindberg on Drama and Theatre is an invaluable resource for those interested in one of t s
the most influential among modern European playwrights. a a
n t
d t
Egil Törnqvist is professor emeritus in Scandinavian studies at the University i
b g
of Amsterdam. Among his more recent books are Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate i
r r
Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation (1999), Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata: From Text to g i
i b
Performance (2000), Bergman’s Muses: Æsthetic Versatility in Film, Theatre, Television t
t d
and Radio (2003), and Eugene O’Neill: A Playwright’s Theatre (2004). He received the
a n
Strindberg Prize in 2004. s a
t
e t
Birgitta Steene is professor emerita in literature and film at the University of e s
n i
Washington, Seattle. She is the author of August Strindberg: The Greatest Fire (1974) e v
q
and the editor of Strindberg and History (1986) and the year book Strindbergiana (1997- s n
t
2005). Her most recent work is Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide (2006). r
r
i ö
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d

What a gift it is to hear Strindberg’s clear and daring voice and to experience how b l
e i
g
truly modern he was in his thinking. His understanding of the theatre and the art r
g e
of acting and his constant search for truth and meaning – in everything and

o
everyone – demands that we stay truthful to his plays and to ourselves.
n

Bo Corre, member of the New York Actors Studio. d
r
a
Whether studying or teaching Strindberg, preparing to produce one of his plays or m
a Strindberg
simply enjoying engaging with 19th-20th century theatre and drama seen through

a
the eyes of one of its giants, this work is an indispensible companion, resource and n
guide. d

t
on Drama and
Anne-Charlotte Harvey, Professor Emerita of the School of Theatre, Television and h
e
Film, San Diego State University.
a
t
r
e Theatre
www.aup.nl
Amsterdam University Press 9 789053 563502 Amsterdam University Press
Törnqvist.indd 1 10-09-2007 13:47:18
strindberg on drama and theatre

strindberg
on drama and theatre
a source book
Selected, translated, and edited by Egil Törnqvist
and Birgitta Steene
Amsterdam University Press
Cover illustration: August Strindberg at his writing desk. Etching
by Anders Zorn, 1910.
Cover: Geert de Koning, Ten Post
Lay-out: Het Steen Typografie, Maarssen
isbn 9789053560204
nur 670
© Amsterdam University Press, 2007
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part
of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or trans-
mitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the
author of the book.
Contents
Preface 7
Introduction 11
Strindberg on Drama and Theatre
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
Strindberg’s Plays 174
Notes 179
Select Bibliography 190
Name and Title Index 195
Subject Index 202

Preface
Together with Norway’s Henrik Ibsen and Russia’s Anton Chekhov, Sweden’s
August Strindberg (1849-1912) has long been recognized as a leading drama-
tist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Of these three, Strind-
berg has proven the most seminal to the development of modern drama.
What is less known is that throughout his adult life, Strindberg frequently
commented on drama and theatre in general and on his own plays and the stag-
ing of them in particular. Two such texts are widely distributed and frequently
reprinted, the preface to Miss Julie, often hailed as themanifesto of modern dra-
ma, and the prefatory note to A Dream Play, outlining the techniques of what
later became known as dramatic expressionism. But a host of others are virtually
unknown to an English-speaking audience. This regrettable oversight motivates
the present book, which is being published at an auspicious moment in Strind-
berg scholarship. The Swedish edition of Strindberg’s letters in 22carefully an-
notated volumes is now complete and most of the projected 72volumes in a new
scholarly edition of his collected works have been published, including virtually
all of the plays as well as the volume entitled Teater och Intima Teatern(Theatre
and the Intimate Theatre). Both editions provide a firm underpinning for this
source book.
Selections include most of Strindberg’s significant statements on drama and
theatre. Most, but not all, for we have tried to avoid repetitiveness by limiting,
for example, similar statements to different addressees and by leaving out cer-
tain technical descriptions related to specific productions.
Moreover, our volume does not include texts which have only thematic rele-
vance to Strindberg’s plays. A concrete example may illustrate this point. In his
A Blue Book I(1907), one of the short pieces – there are hundreds of them – is en-
titled “A Whole Life in an Hour.” Here the narrator describes how he one morn-
ing, “obeying an exhortation,” went for a walk in town, seemingly at random.
He passed the neighborhood where he was born and had been educated, where
he had worked as a teacher, where he was accepted as an actor, where he handed
in his first play, where he married his first wife, and where his third wife and their
child had been living three years earlier. He concludes: “In an hour I had gone
through my life in living pictures; another three years and I would have arrived
preface 7
at the present time. It was like an agonieor moment of death when all of life trav-
els past.”
This suggestive description can easily be related to several of Strindberg’s
plays. There is the telescoping of time, recognizable in The Ghost Sonatawhere
the Student-narrator experiences a whole life in not much more than an hour,
the playing time of the drama. There is the idea of retracing one’s steps, appear-
ing in the pilgrimage drama To Damascus.And there is the sense of imminent
death at the end of A Dream Playwhere the Poet, commenting on what we have
just witnessed in the stage action, remarks: “I read somewhere that when life ap-
proaches its end, everyone and everything passes quickly by in review ... is this
the end?” To which Indra’s Daughter answers: “For me, yes.”
The Blue Book fragment obviously sheds light on all three plays. We have nev-
ertheless refrained from including texts of this kind since doing so would not
only have increased the size of this book immensely, it would also have been ex-
ceedingly difficult to find a principle for limiting the material.
Our book opens with a brief introduction, sketching Strindberg’s relation-
ship to drama and theatre and outlining some of his most important ideas on
these subjects. This is followed by the main part, i.e. the relevant texts by Strind-
berg himself, all in chronological order with regard to the time of writing. Each
item is provided with a date of composition, explanatory notes and, in the case
of the letters and memos, a short presentation of the addressee the first time s/he
is mentioned. It would naturally have been helpful if the letters from the ad-
dressees could have been included, but unfortunately these are, with few excep-
tions, no longer extant. The brief presentations of the addressees give at least an
indication of the context; more comprehensive presentations can be found in
Michael Robinson’s edition of Strindberg’s letters.
The volume concludes with a list of Strindberg’s plays, plus dates when they
were first published and first performed, again in chronological order with re-
gard to the time of writing. For further reading, we have included a rather exten-
sive list of works dealing with Strindberg’s plays. A few illustrations are provided
to highlight the material. Finally, there is a name and title index and a subject in-
dex to enable the reader to explore topics of particular interest.
The choice of a chronological arrangement warrants an explanation. One ob-
vious alternative, grouping relevant material around a number of Strindberg’s
plays, would have had the disadvantage of leaving out much pertinent subject
8 strindberg on drama and theatre
matter simply because it would not fit under the chosen headings. Moreover,
such an organizational principle would necessarily blur the developmental as-
pect preserved in a chronological arrangement. With a dramatist as impulsive
and protean as Strindberg, there is every reason to keep track of whena state-
ment was made. Besides, as already indicated, our indexes give readers the op-
portunity to make their own systematization of the material.
Stylistically, Strindberg’s observations on drama and theatre share the charac-
teristics of much of his other work. His mode of expression is highly idiosyncrat-
ic, often very direct, sometimes extremely laconic, sometimes rather circum-
stantial, frequently drastically colorful. Bearing signs of having been written in
haste, his comments may occasionally seem inconsistent and are at times am-
biguous. Though we have tried to retain the author’s spontaneity, we have pro-
vided brief notes or have made emendations to those passages which require
clarification in order to be understood. In one case, this has resulted in a change
of terms. When speaking of the individual member of the audience, Strindberg
often refers to the åhörare(listener) rather than the åskådare (spectator). After
the emergence of radio, and radio plays, it would be misleading to retain Strind-
berg’s term, which might well be seen less as an expression of the spirit of the
time than of the author’s individual need to stress the primacy of the word. We
have consistently replaced ‘listener’ with ‘spectator.’ With regard to punctua-
tion, Strindberg’s texts are characterized by the frequent use of dashes, semi-
colons and exclamation marks. In the interest of readability, we have often seen
fit to replace these either with commas or full stops. For the same reason we have
sometimes departed from Strindberg’s unpredictable use of capitals, italics,
brackets, and quotation marks. Throughout the volume, S stands for Strind-
berg, [-] indicates an omission. In the texts by S, parentheses are by the author,
square brackets by the editors. Single quotation marks indicate that a word is
used in a special, often non-literal sense.
Egil Törnqvist is primarily responsible for the selection and editing of the
texts, Birgitta Steene for the translation into (American) English. In both cases,
the editors have critically scrutinized each other’s contributions and conse-
quently carry a joint responsibility for the final result.
Part of the material included in this volume was earlier translated and anno-
tated by the late Professor Walter Johnson (University of Washington) and by
Professor Michael Robinson (University of East Anglia); see the Bibliography
preface 9