If the men’s rights movement is looking for a spokesman, it could do worse than Gustav in August Strindberg’s three-hander, adapted in 2008 by David Greig and given a scintillating revival by Stewart Laing. He is the spurned lover who wheedles his way into his ex-wife’s new marriage while pushing a doctrine of male superiority and female deference.
It’s not exactly that the arguments are persuasive (in the age of #MeToo, they raise the occasional laugh), but Stuart McQuarrie’s Gustav is slimily plausible. Looking like the playwright himself, complete with quiff and buttoned-up jacket, he remains cool and moderate as if to suggest his views about emasculation and the dangers of free-thinking women are the consequence of reasoning not vested interest. He is both creepy and charismatic.
Certainly, Gustav impresses Adolph (Edward Franklin), all boyish optimism and dark mood swings, whose easy conversational manner is offset by McQuarrie’s restraint. His real match is Tekla (Adura Onashile), her sharpness of mind and emotional intelligence as powerful as her erotic desire. Performed straight through in three brooding encounters, with nobody entirely right or wrong, the play anticipates the irreconcilable conflict of David Mamet’s Oleanna.
Laing pushes the archetypal nature of the conflict further by setting it in a symbolist landscape, his arresting summer house set full of distorted perspectives and odd angles. Scene divisions are marked by a procession of four Girl Guides, mechanically waving semaphore flags and making fires, seeming familiar yet strange. Likewise, the final scene, played out on film, has the twin effects of being emotionally revealing and theatrically distancing. For all of the misogyny, the arguments about passion and possession, partnership and dependency, rage on.
• At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 12 May. Box office: 0131-248 4848.
