Theatre

Franco Manzoni

Strindberg, born in Stockholm in 1849 where he died in 1912, started off from the naturalism and from which he took away in order to create an autonomous artistic life, centred over the analysis of the human I as the moving cause of all actions.
First he succeeded in putting himself in light by the work “Master Olof” (1872), but he achieved wide success and notoriety ten years after the theatrical pieces “The Father” (1887) and “Miss Julie” (1888).
The three-act drama “The father” moves around the themes concerning the man-woman relationship and draws with extraordinary pathetic force the psychical clash between husband and wife around the matter of the fatherhood of the daughter.
Laura, wife of Captain Adolf, succeeds insinuating deviously the doubt into her husband's mind that he could not be the real father of the daughter Berta and by the means she leads him on methodically to madness.
At the end the man, already psychically exhausted, is dying on his wet nurse's lap, prisoner into this cage where his wife together with his wet nurse has trapped him.
In “Miss Julie”, instead, Strindberg tells about a young noblewoman that during the St. John's Night, charmed and seduced, concede herself to a servant of the House of Jean, moved more by instinct than by a deep feeling.
The servant tries to take advantage from this situation and persuades Julie to steal an amount of money from the father strongbox and then to leave away together. The young woman does not have anymore the strength to be opposed and it seems everything is fixed till when Jean kills a siskin Julie was very fond of and that she meant to bring with her getting away.
For this immediate cause she is plenty of feelings, among which the fear to be discovered, the blood of the killed little bird, and the emotional gap between she and her servant: everything leads her to understand that the abandon to senses cannot either go on anymore or become her will in life.
The sole resolution her mind gets to is committing suicide by employing a razor the same servant brings her.
To a second period it belongs six works by which the author reveals his own investigation and aspiration to an inside poise that he seems to achieve by the unceasing need of the presence of God even if not featured by severe ecclesiastic rules.
It belongs to these years “Toward Damascus” (1898-1901), “Advent” (1898), “Crime and crime” (1899), “Death dance” (1901), “Easter” (1901) e “The dream” (1902). “Toward Damascus” offers a symbolic interpretation of human life going on by employing several emblematic figures: almost if it were a process by degrees going from sin through sufferance till expiation.
In “The Dream” the author renews widely the theatrical structures by suppressing the concepts of space and time featuring reality and proposing those proper of dream; indeed the space-time function losses the logic sequence and reality and imagination intersect, rising situations to which Strindberg gives metaphorical meanings.
Another important moment in his life and work was the realization, along with the director August Falk, of the “Intima Teater” of Stockholm, a little theatre for which he wrote in the same year, the 1907, far as five so-called “chamber” works: “The sonata of the spectres”, “The Pelican”, “The rainstorm”, “The burnt house” and “The Isle of the dead”.
The themes of distress and desperation, the asociality, the repeating idea of the fear of death, the search of a belief, already nagging him since the early works get most important in this last phase of his existence.