How do you solve the problems of Strindberg's strange, 100-year-old play? Clearly by getting a Swedish company to employ a visual maestro. Six years ago Robert Lepage, working with Sweden's Dramaten, set the whole action in a rotating, open-sided cube. Now Robert Wilson, with Stockholm's Stadtsteatern, gives us a series of painterly tableaux evoking artists as different as Magritte and Andrew Wyeth. The result is weirdly hypnotic.
Wilson proves the ideal director for the piece since his work, like Strindberg's, is about recurrence. From the start, when we see Agnes, daughter of the god Indra, descending to earth to see what it is like to be human, we have a sense of cyclical reiteration. An officer waits eternally for his lover, marriages grow and fall apart, childhood lessons haunt the imagination, life is a battle between pain and joy.
I have always thought Strindberg's play an uneasy mix of Indian mysticism, Freudian psychology and his own pessimism. But Wilson's clear, strangely moving production shows its dominant theme is one common to much great drama: stoical endurance in the face of misfortune. When the question of "What causes most suffering on earth?" is answered with "Being alive", one is straight into the world of Beckett. If life, as Strindberg suggests, is a meaningless dream, it is one to be suffered with maximum grace.
But Wilson's achievement is to give the play a concrete reality through light, sound, music and images. Agnes's unhappy marriage is evoked through a long table at which they sit in silence. Foulstrand, a quarantined beach and source of misery, is dominated by a silhouetted figure. Michael Galasso's remarkable score adds to the sense of atmosphere: Fingal's Cave, where Agnes offers to marry a poor lawyer, is aurally evoked by the haunting sound of hurdy-gurdy, recorder and lute.
Wilson's flaw has always been that he de-individualises performers. But that scarcely matters since Strindberg's people are types rather than characters; and, even though Jessica Liedberg impresses as a saddened Agnes with fierce, swept-back hair, the abiding impression is of actors used as figures in a series of exquisite compositions. The result may not be to everyone's taste but it catches the Virgilian sense of "tears in mortal things" that haunts Strindberg's strange, compassionate, undeniably seminal play.
Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7638 8891. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
