If I tell you that the eponymous hero of this play is a paranoid Swedish artist who has a love-hate relationship with his actor-wife Harriet, is obsessed with alchemy and constantly drinks absinthe, you will rightly assume that he bears a close resemblance to August Strindberg. Given that David Hauptschein's play is based on Strindberg's occult diaries, I can't understand why he has bothered to give the story a fictional coating.
The action largely takes place inside the deluded memory of Lutzen. We are privy to his belief that he is being pursued by "the hand of the unseen", that Harriet is unfaithful and that there is a secret fire inside base metals. But it is not only draining to spend two-and-a-half hours inside the head of a neurasthenic, it also doesn't make for drama since the other characters are little more than projections of the hero's fantasies. And, although Lutzen's death is a relief, Hauptschein gratuitously implies that his strong spirit possesses his survivors.
Behind the play lies the romantic fallacy that you have to be mad to create great art: what this ignores is that even Strindberg admitted that his melancholy was blended with "the most astonishing lightheartedness" and sanely cited disarmament as the social reform he most espoused. Given the monotony of Hauptschein's play, the cast do a decent job in Julio Maria Martino's production. Tom Cornish's Lutzen is plausibly tormented and Maria Dalberg's Harriet radiates Nordic beauty. But all I learned from watching Lutzen's rejection of painting for liqueur-fuelled fantasies is that absinthe makes the art grow harder.
