From the Director:
This evening we have the opportunity to celebrate the remarkable literary career of August Strindberg, considered Sweden's national playwright. Born on January 22, 1859, strindberg became one of the famosu and infamous man of letters in Sweden. Along with Kenrik Ibsen he is credited as founding father of modern drama. The power of his rhetoric has never been disputed. Indeed, most modern theatre movements claim Strindberg as one of their own; Andre Breton, leader of the Surrealists, once stated, "Strindberg saw it all before us." Yet, his works are infrequently performed in this country.

We are remedying that tonight. In The Stronger and The Ghost Sonata we have two fine examples from two different literary styles: a Darwinist piece of naturalism and a chamger play from his Post-Inferno period. The Stronger (1889) precedes The Ghost Sonata (1907) in performance as it does in its chronological place in Strindberg's dramatic Oeuvre.

In The Stronger we have the most famous of Strindberg's quart d'heures. Originally tailored to fit the needs of the Theatre Libre in Paris, this masterful study of human psychology depicts two actresses, one married and the other unmarried and the other unmarried, meeting by chance at a cafe on Christmas Eve afternoon. An experiment in performace art, one character does all the talking while the other remains mute. In this battle of the mind and heart over a man, which is stronger?

As Margery Morgan points out many believe that Strindberg wrote it for his first wife, Siri von Essen to play. Gunnar Ollen agrees, stating that the characters in the play were actually modeled after Siri and a rival, Danish actress Nathalia Larsen. Michael Meyer insists it was not Nathalia (who was offered the role), but a young actress by the name of Helga Frankenfeldt whom Strindberg had just broken off an afaair. Although it seems that Siri was not particularly jealous of these rivavls, Strindberg still used the theme of rival actresses as the motif for the drama. The writing is plaful. Written to appeal to a boulevard theatre audience, The Stronger was intdended to tou. By one actress remaining silten, Siri could play both roles: for productions in Swedish of Finnish, she would play Madame X, in other countries where she was not as fluent she could play Miss Y.

But who is The Stronger? Strindberg is not helpful here. In an 1889 newspaper interview he commented that the stronger woman was the one who remained silent. Yet, in his note to Siri before its premiere, he states that "She is an actress, not just an ordinary respectable housewife. She is the stronger, i.e. the softer. What is hard and stiff breaks, what is elastic gives and returns to its shape." Many directors and actresses have relished interpreting this play. Because the writing is very even handed for both women, both interpretations work well. We'll leave it up to you to decide: who si the stronger?

In May 1916, Max Reinhardt brought his Kammerspiele Company to Stockholm. The Ghost Sonata was performed at Operan with Paul Wegner as Hummel and Gertrud Eysoldt as the Mummyt. The Swedish critics were aglow. A German had taught the Sweeds about the potential and power of Strindberg's chamber play!

Michael Meyer in August Strindberg explains that even with revivalsof Strindberg's plays after his death, the Swedish public remained "skeptical, and the literary establishment still dismissed him as a failed crank, or at best a failed genius." Reinhardt's Ghost Sonata "hitherto regarded as theatrically impossible," played Stockhol, "forcing the Swedes to reconsider it."

The Ghost Sonata, orignally produced at Deutsches Theatre (1916), was the second guest performance of Reinhardt's company in Stockholm. It was an uncommon success, playing for nearly three months as the Royal Opera in stockholm. Sven Soderman, writing for Stockholms Dagbladet, remarks: "It is embarrassing for our national selfesteem, that his dramatic work there [in Germany] becomes codified in a form that must stand as a prototype for us." Herbert Grevenius's notes that: "The Play was written seven years before 1914. You need war and revolutions to make people in general, realists. When the cultural plaster fell away, it got its chance, and the German's great magician Reinhardt came here and frightened even Strindberg's old adversaires into admiration."

Calling Reinhardt "a poet over the poetry," Bo Bergman in his Dagens Nyheter review remakrs that the production came "close to parody" as the "ghost atmosphere strikes against the audience with a breeze from another world." Reinhardt's direction emphasized the play as nightmarish, grotesque, and utterly terrifying. However, several critics not that the first scene in the play, as written by strindberg, contains no hint of the "demonic machincations" that Reinhardt produced on stage. Strindberg's setting of a lovely clear summer Sunday morning was instead redered as "shrouded in darkness that was only dispelled expressionistically with the Students Entrance." Ann-Charlotte Harvey asserts that when A Ghost Sonata is reviewed "merely as a bizarre picture of reality" -- an externalization of inner torment -- the depiction of the setting tends to lean toward caricature instead of reality.

Reinhardt's interpretation, like Ingmar Bergman's fotry years later at the Malmo City Theatre, depicted the play as the Student's dream, as nightmare landscape. In Reinhardt's second act, in order to heighten the nightmare, "the salon in Act II was made overtly ghostly and ghastly by a posionous green wallpaper with a toadstool pattern and deep purple furniture." This grotestque picture of reality became the accepted wayt ot approach any Strindberg play in Sweden for decades. Indeed, as student Dramaturg, Emily Bosscher notes, Reinhardt's dark expressionistic vision has also become the accepted interpretation of Strindberg in this country.

Our production doesn't follow Reinhardt's directorial interpretation. Rather, we take our cue from the legendary Swedish director Olof Molander, the founder of the Strindberg tradition in Sweden. Molander's approach sought to depict a dual reality present in Strindberg's drama, an intersection of human and spiritual realities. Molander used irony and humore, and Christian imagery to depict characters of flesh and blood father than nightmarish vampires and horror figures. We take our lead from his sens of compassions regarding Strindberg's falwed and suffering characters. "we are only wretched human beings," says the Mummy in the play, "We have trespassed and we ahve sinned, like all the ressst. We are not what we seem, for deep down we are better than ourselves, since we detest our faults."

Strindberg's revolutionary ideas and images were a result of his search for a place in his world and a spiritual search for transcendence. The existence of the real world and that of "Jenseits" or the "other world" textured this reality. Gunnar Ollen States that Strindberg was "a scientific observer and a the same time a psychologist who, under the thin guise of dramatist, offered astute contributions to the understanding of homosapiens." This understanding went beyond the superficial physical aspects of living. Strinberg's intense interest in physical reality was merely a cehicle for understanding that which cannot be seen. Goren Stockenstrom states that Strindberg adopted swedenbeorg's belief that creation could be understood through empirical observations in nuater. The visible materical world was the gateway to the invisible. Quoting the Talmud, Strinberg said: "If you wish to know the invisible, observe with your own eyes the visible."

In this play, a young studen wanders by a fashionable aprtment imagining what life is like behind the facade. AS he gains entrance to this "paradise," he discovers that not all is waht it seems. Themes of guilt and atonement permeate this turn of the century moral fable. Strindberg's chamger play illuminates the darker and spiritual sides of middle class motivaitons and behaviors. The play asks: What illusions does one need to live? What is true beauty and what is mere image? Where does resignation, compassion and, pity reside in a human heart ravaged by sin?

Humankind is to be pitied. Our obsession with image without substance, lies and hypocrisy over turth and honesty, robs us of lfie. Strinberg calls us to a better future.

The Characters