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'''August Strindberg''' a Swedish playwright, novelist and painter (1849-1912), a fiercely original writer whose restless experimentation made him one of the founders of modern drama and a major influence on the theatre of the twentieth century. His work spans naturalism, expressionism and a late symbolist phase, and his turbulent private life fed directly into plays of extraordinary psychological intensity.

== Life and Temperament ==
Johan August Strindberg was born in Stockholm in 1849, the son of a shipping merchant and a former domestic servant, and the shame of a childhood marked by poverty, neglect and family discord became the raw material of his writing. He was an unhappy and brilliant child, and the sense of being unwanted and misunderstood that he carried into adulthood gave his work its raw and accusing power.

He tried many careers in youth, including teaching, acting and journalism, before settling as a writer, and he worked for a time in the Royal Library in Stockholm. His first important work was the historical novel The Red Room (1879), a satire of Stockholm society that made him famous and gave its name to a whole period of Swedish literature. Its irreverence toward respectable institutions established him as the conscience and the gadfly of his country.

His personal life was as violent and restless as his art. He married three times, and each marriage fed into plays that turned private anguish into drama of general significance. He suffered periods of mental crisis, above all in the mid-1890s, when he moved to Paris and then to Sweden and passed through a phase of religious and psychological torment that he called the Inferno crisis and described in a book of that name.

== Naturalist Plays and Miss Julie ==
Strindberg's naturalist plays of the 1880s broke new ground in their frank treatment of class and sex. The Father (1887) sets a struggle between a man and his wife over the destiny of their daughter, and its ferocious logic makes it a milestone of the modern stage. Comrades and Creditors continued the analysis of marriage as a field of conflict, and The Dance of Death portrayed a union curdled into mutual hatred and dependence.

Miss Julie (1888) is the most celebrated of these works. In a single act it stages the encounter between an aristocratic young woman and her father's valet on midsummer night, a collision of rank, desire and self-destruction that ends in tragedy. Strindberg wrote a preface setting out his naturalist programme, in which character is a product of heredity and environment and dialogue is broken and evasive rather than neatly rational.

The preface to Miss Julie became one of the most important documents of the naturalist theatre, and the play itself, with its compressed action and its attention to the determinants of behaviour, has proved the most durable of all his works. In these plays he turned the stage into a laboratory in which the conflict between men and women, and between the strong and the weak, is observed without sentimentality.

== Expressionism and Dream Plays ==
After the crisis of the 1890s Strindberg turned away from naturalism toward a drama of the inner life. To Damascus (1898 onward) follows an unnamed stranger through a pilgrimage of guilt and reconciliation, and its structure of dreamlike encounters anticipates the technique of the later plays. These works abandon the detailed realism of the earlier dramas for a theatre of the soul, in which external reality is transformed by the projections of the mind.

A Dream Play (1902) is the founding work of expressionist drama. It dissolves the boundaries of time, place and identity, and it lets a single consciousness expand into many characters and scenes, so that the play proceeds as a dream proceeds, by association rather than by logic. Its influence on playwrights from O'Neill to Beckett and beyond has been profound.

The Ghost Sonata (1907) carries the method to a bleak and haunting extreme, its characters reduced to symbols and its action to a ritual of unmasking. The chamber plays that Strindberg wrote toward the end of his life were conceived for an intimate theatre and give the drama of the interior an austerity and a concentration that mark the close of his career.

== Prose, Painting and Ideas ==
Strindberg was a prolific writer in many forms besides drama. His novel The People of Hemsö is a comic and robust picture of life in the Stockholm archipelago, and his autobiographical writings, above all The Son of a Servant, the Inferno and Legends, record his inner history with a candour that was then unprecedented. He also wrote histories of the Swedish people, essays, poetry and a large body of letters.

He was a painter as well, and his landscapes of the 1890s, many of them turbulent and semi-abstract, have been recognised as anticipating later developments in modern art. His restless intelligence engaged with the science, philosophy and occult speculation of his day, and he moved from radical scepticism through a period of intense religiosity to a kind of resigned mysticism.

His thought cannot be reduced to a system, but certain concerns persist: the struggle for power between the sexes, the weight of the past upon the present, the search for meaning in a world that seems to withhold it, and the conviction that ordinary life conceals forces too great for the reason to master. These obsessions, rendered in a style that changed as rapidly as his experience, made him a mirror of the anxieties of his age.

== Influence and Legacy ==
Strindberg's influence on the modern theatre is second only to Ibsen's among Scandinavian dramatists. He gave the drama a new psychological depth and a new freedom of form, and his movement from strict naturalism to dreamlike expressionism supplied later writers with a repertoire of techniques for representing the inner life. The expressionist theatre of Germany and America owed him a direct and acknowledged debt.

His plays are constantly revived, and Miss Julie, The Father and A Dream Play are performed throughout the world. Directors value the intensity of his conflicts and the flexibility of his structures, and actors find in his roles a challenge that few dramatists offer. His chamber plays have been especially fruitful for small theatres seeking concentrated effects.

He is remembered, with Ibsen, as one of the two great figures of Scandinavian drama and as a writer who broke the stage open to the irrational and the subconscious. Where Ibsen analysed society, Strindberg anatomised the self, and between them they set the terms in which modern drama has thought about human conflict. His restless experimentation remains an example to every playwright who has sought a form equal to inner experience.

== See also ==
* Expressionism
* A Dream Play
* Miss Julie
* Scandinavian drama

== References ==

<ref name="r1">August Strindberg, Miss Julie and Other Plays, translated by Michael Robinson, Oxford University Press, 1998.</ref>
<ref name="r2">Michael Meyer, Strindberg: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1985.</ref>
<ref name="r3">Egil Törnqvist, Strindberg: The Drama of Confession and Therapy, Norvik Press, 2010.</ref>
<ref name="r4">Sue Prideaux, Strindberg: A Life, Yale University Press, 2012.</ref>

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[[Category:Drama]]
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Sweden]]

August Strindberg - Revision history

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