A count's daughter and her father's valet spend Midsummer night together, and her caged pet bird pays for it (1888)
Miss Julie — the naturalist masterpiece, censored or banned across Europe for decades.
Literature · Playwrights
August Strindberg
1849–1912 · Swedish
Naturalism, then expressionism — the father of modern Swedish drama
August Strindberg was Sweden's greatest and most quarrelsome writer: the author of some sixty plays, a dozen novels, autobiographies, essays and a body of striking seascape paintings. His naturalist chamber tragedies of the 1880s, driven by class and sexual warfare, were followed after a mid-life psychological crisis by dreamlike, fragmented plays that made him a founding father of expressionist theatre. He never won the Nobel Prize, and never forgave the academy for it.
How to spot them
- ▸Swedish; three stormy marriages, all ending in divorce and all turned into copy
- ▸The 'Inferno crisis' of the mid-1890s: occultism, alchemy and persecution mania in Paris
- ▸The preface arguing that stage characters are unstable 'conglomerations' with no fixed souls
- ▸Founded his own tiny Intimate Theatre in Stockholm in 1907 to stage his chamber plays
- ▸Also a painter of turbulent seascapes and an early experimenter in photography
Key works
A cavalry captain is driven mad by his wife's hint that their daughter may not be his, and is finally strapped into a straitjacket by his old nurse (1887)
The Father — the first of the naturalist chamber tragedies.
The daughter of an Indian god descends to earth and concludes, again and again, that human beings are to be pitied (1901)
A Dream Play — dream logic and dissolving scenes, a direct ancestor of expressionism.
A student, an old man in a wheelchair, a milkmaid nobody else can see, and a mummy who lives in a cupboard (1907)
The Ghost Sonata — the strangest of the chamber plays written for his Intimate Theatre.
An artillery captain and his wife torment one another in an island fortress as their silver wedding approaches (1900)
The Dance of Death — the model for decades of marital-combat drama.
An 1879 satirical novel on Stockholm journalism, charity and officialdom that made his name at thirty (1879)
The Red Room — often called the first modern Swedish novel.
A confessional book, written in French, about the author's Paris years of alchemy, sulphur experiments and persecution mania (1897)
Inferno — the account of the crisis that splits his career in two.
Key ideas
- Naturalism on stage: heredity, environment and 'the battle of the brains' between unequal characters
- Characters as unstable bundles of motives rather than fixed types, set out in his preface to Miss Julie
- After 1898, dream structure: time and place dissolve, figures split and double, nothing is solid
- The 'chamber play' — few actors, one room, a small theatre, modelled on chamber music
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Stockholm on 22 January 1849; his autobiography is titled The Son of a Servant
- •Married three times: to Siri von Essen, Frida Uhl and Harriet Bosse
- •Prosecuted for blasphemy in 1884 over his story collection Getting Married, and acquitted
- •Founded the Intima Teatern in Stockholm in 1907 with the actor August Falck
- •His historical plays include Master Olof, Gustav Vasa and Erik XIV
- •Painted stormy, thickly worked seascapes now held in Swedish national collections
- •Died of stomach cancer in Stockholm on 14 May 1912; huge crowds followed the coffin
- •Never awarded the Nobel Prize; in 1912 the Swedish public raised an 'anti-Nobel' subscription for him instead
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Sources
- Sue Prideaux — Strindberg: A Life
- Michael Meyer — Strindberg: Plays One (introduction)