Sometimes everything is in place – splendid cast, interestingly neglected classic text, thoughtful director – and yet the production just lies there, inert, on the stage. That’s what’s happened with Tom Littler’s revival of August Strindberg’s triangular psychodrama from 1888, starring the septuagenarian power trio of Charles Dance, Geraldine James and Nicholas Farrell.
The casting of charismatic older actors could add an edge of urgency to the characters’ vengeful score-settling, but instead this is a humdrum, talky, and unmoving 85 minutes. Partly it’s that Howard Brenton’s adaptation sounds more quaint and Victorian than older translations. But mostly it’s that the mind games and power plays unfold with all the gravitas of a light drawing-room comedy. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the ridiculously overblown conclusion.
In a hotel by the sea Farrell’s ailing artist Adolf succumbs to the will of Dance’s sardonic, vulturish Gustaf. They’ve only known each other a week but Adolf has already forsaken painting for sculpture (“I can no longer speak with colour alone”) at Gustaf’s urging.
Now Adolf confesses his worries about his flirtatious novelist wife Tekla (James), who has herself been away for a week. What ho! Alert audience members may already suspect something is afoot. Especially once Gustaf recognises a nude, prone clay figurine that Adolf is working on as Tekla even though it hasn’t got a face.
Adolf taught Tekla to swim and spell but now feels she is a succubus, draining away his life force, his ideas and his friends with her “independent spirit”. Gustaf, while casually disparaging women in general and Tekla in particular, tells Adolf to confront her on her return, then shut himself in a nearby room so Gustaf himself can upbraid her: an echo of the arras scene from Hamlet which has equally fatal results.
Strindberg is commonly labelled a misogynist and it’s hard to dispute on this evidence. Gustaf decrees that a husband is a fool to trust his wife, that a man’s place is to educate a woman and even that a naked woman is “a man who’s incomplete”.
Even if one accepts that the Swedish dramatist was addressing the standards of his time, or merely lashing out because of his own unhappy marriage, the play is laced with a fear of female sexuality. Certainly, he viewed romantic relationships as a battleground and a zero sum game, where someone must be the “creditor”.
Farrell’s Adolf, limping on a wooden crutch as a metaphor for his emasculation, and told by Gustaf that he’s developed epilepsy thanks to Tekla’s sexual excesses (sorry, what?), seems mildly peeved rather than desperate or enraged. Dance’s Gustaf circles him like a cartoon predator, his piercing gaze and wry smirk fixed. James’s Tekla is a whimsical creature prone to mimsy gesticulations.
There’s no heat between any of them. Brenton’s script is full of unsayable lines: “You couldn’t grow alone and my stem couldn’t bear the loss of its main branch.” The deadening air of restraint and good taste is fostered by Louie Whitemore’s designs, with muted costumes and misty blue walls that echo Gustaf’s forsaken paintings, and fussily immaculate fin-de-siecle furniture.
I had high hopes for Littler’s production. Greater resources and a bigger stage has allowed the Orange Tree’s artistic director to more fully flex the aesthetics he formerly brought to Jermyn St Theatre, including the excavation of lost gems.
Strindberg was a pioneer of realism, who paved the way for his Norwegian contemporary Ibsen. (Indeed, on reading Hedda Gabler he wrote: “My seed has actually fallen into Ibsen's brain-pan - and grown! Now he carries my semen and is my uterus!”) I’d never seen Creditors before: unlike Miss Julie, or even Dance of Death, it’s had only one major London production in the last 30 years. Now, perhaps, I see why.
To 11 Oct, orangetreetheatre.co.uk.
