Miss Julie (1888):
Miss Julie premiered in November 1906 at ‘The People’s Theatre’. It’s a one-act play set in the kitchen of a Count’s manor house with only three characters Julie, Jean, and Christine on stage. While the count is away the whole time, Jean and Julie engage in flirtatious acts that lead to an off-stage act of intimacy. After that, Julie feels fallen socially and morally whiles Jean tries to take advantage of the situation to elope with her to Switzerland where he can rise up the social ladder. In the end Jean reverts to being servile when the Count arrives. Meanwhile, Julie heads off-stage with a razor to commit suicide on Jean’s request.
Strindberg seems to have borrowed from his real-life experiences in writing Miss Julie. Strindberg’s first wife Siri was a noble woman and Strindberg himself the son of maidservant. Strindberg stayed in the manor of Countess when writing Miss Julie. He suspected the countess was having an affair with her half-brother. Also, Around the time, a failed Swedish novelist had committed suicide. Miss Julie adapts the combination of all these real life instances.
According to Strindberg, what ensues in the play is based on the theory of ‘survival of the fittest’ by Charles Darwin. In the preface written about Miss Julie, Strindberg explains his naturalistic framing of the plot. Miss Julie is acted upon by the natural forces of heredity, environment and chance,
The Father (1887):
A play which has had an enormous impact on some of the leading dramatists of the 20th century, The Father was Strindberg’s first effort to shift the subject matter of plays, introducing a contemporary dramaturgy. In the play a husband and wife struggle tragically for possession of their only child. The husband, a scientist and military office, wants their daughter to study to become a teacher and financially independent whereas the mother prefers her daughter studies painting at home. Meanwhile, neither parent considers the daughter’s own choice.
The Father is one of Strindberg’s plays that can be interpreted as having misogynistic underpinnings. A military officer, the father is used to exercising unquestioned authority. The mother uses mental warfare to induce doubt in her husband about his fatherhood therefore hurting his self-esteem. Thus, the father, who represents patriarchal society, falls under irrational forces induced by the mother, who represents the Modern Woman that demands her place in society.
The men in the play are all authority figures whereas the women are portrayed as whimsical and prompted by irrationality. Even when a servant is accused of seducing a maid, his superiors gives him authority while the pregnant maid is declared guilty. But in the end, the father is driven to insanity by succumbing to ‘feminine irrationality’. Strindberg chose to make the play about inward action, such as the father going insane when his belief in his fatherhood is overthrown.
The Stronger (1888-89)
The Stronger is a naturalistic piece involving a three-character one-act in which the central character , am married man, never appears and one of the two female rivals for his love says nothing. The Stronger is rich in allegory and lends itself to many layers of interpretation. Again, Strindberg uses characterless characters: In fact, the two women are differentiated by X and Y. Mrs X is overprotective of her husband and tries to fend off all women who come near him. While Mrs X is the one who does all the talking in the play, Mrs. Y’s appearance and demeanor also tell a lot. In the end, readers/audience are left with questions about who the ‘stronger’ character is.
A Dream Play (1901):
In both A Dream Play (1901) and The Ghost Sonata (1907), Strindberg writes in his then new-found Post-Inferno Expressionist mode where time, place, characters, and situations merge, split and melt. In A Dream Play ,an Indic god Indra who yearns to learn about human nature reincarnates as a woman named Agnes. On earth she engages in a journey guided by three ‘characterless characters’ an Officer, a Lawyer and a Poet.
Strindberg wrote to actress Harriet Bosse, his wife who had just left him, that the play was about her. Strindberg saw her third wife as his savior. In the play, Agnes’s first mission is to free the officer who is imprisoned. Agnes ends up marrying the Lawyer, becoming a mother and performing earthly roles only to reject those roles later. The play presents a world of contradictions, where human beings cannot rely on divine providence anymore.
The Ghost Sonata (1907)
Also expressionist, The Ghost Sonata showcases Strindberg’s artistic journey from the external to the internal, from the material to the spiritual. The play premiered at Strindberg’s own Intimate Theatre. Nevertheless, the theatre had a hard time with staging as the play posed many challenges. Having had a bad reception at its premiere in Stockholm, The Ghost Sonata will be produced across Europe ,with heavy modifications, each production aiming to reconcile Strindberg’s ambitious artistic mission with the taste of the theatre goers at the time.
The play was inspired by Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor (the “Gespenster Sonata”) and Piano Trio No. 4 in D major (the “Ghost Trio”) and maintains a surrealistic, fantastical mood throughout. It is about an old man, Hummel, and a Colonel who are pitted against each other. The Colonel had seduced the woman Hummel loved. Hummel introduces a student to his peculiar coterie, which includes both the Colonel’s wife (known as the Mummy) and her frail daughter, who draws life from hyacinths. At a “ghost supper” in the Colonel’s apartment, Hummel humiliates the Colonel and tells the guests that the girl isn’t the Colonel daughter but his. Hummel commits suicide when the Mummy reveals his detestable past. At the end, the audience are warned that they too cannot escape their sins.