‘Death to poetry, long live science!” So cries August Strindberg in Howard Brenton’s new play about the period when the Swedish dramatist renounced drama to pursue his obsession with alchemy and the occult. But, while Brenton’s play has a strange fascination, it seems unsure whether to view Strindberg’s bizarre experiments as a sign of madness or a necessary part of his artistic development.
Brenton seizes on the month of February, 1896, when Strindberg was holed up a Paris hotel and dedicating himself to alchemy – a process recalled in his autobiographical novel, Inferno. In Brenton’s version the solitary writer is haunted by three women who become yet more obstacles in his scientific progress. First Lola, a provocative cleaner, hints at seduction while threatening to have him thrown out of the hotel. Then Strindberg’s first wife, the Finnish Siri von Essen, turns up to re-enact the traumas of their marriage while begging him to help restore her acting career. Finally his second wife, the Austrian Frida Uhl, arrives to warn him against Siri and her plans to certify him insane.
In 90 minutes, Brenton manages to condense much of Strindberg’s personal history, and his life is shown to echo his plays – such as when he is confined to a straitjacket like the hero of The Father. Brenton also writes with his usual aphoristic vividness, as when Strindberg is told that his love/disgust conflict about sex stems from his being a lapsed Protestant, or when he announces that “plays should always be written in anger”. But this play seems to derive from two totally contradictory impulses: on the one hand, confirming that Strindberg was insanely paranoid and, on the other, suggesting that alchemy is akin to the artistic process and stimulated the productive experimentalism of the dramatist’s later years.
Tom Littler’s production, ushering in a new regime that will later bring us Brenton’s version of Miss Julie, is, however, vividly done. Jasper Britton, with wild eyes and unruly locks, admirably suggests that Strindberg is a man in the grip of an idée fixe and tormented by his shifting attitude towards women. Susannah Harker as the aristocratic Siri, Gala Gordon as the beguiling Frida and Laura Morgan as the pragmatic Lola also rightly play his various partners from their own spirited point of view.
However, the play left me feeling that Brenton, while enlightening us about Strindberg’s alchemical phase, had not quite succeeded in turning it into theatrical gold.
- At the Jermyn Street theatre, until 14 October. Box office: 020-7287 2875.
