the scene is dull and says nothing, but cannot be excluded ––– Bergman directs A Dream Play

Ingmar Bergman devotes a chapter of The Magic Lantern to A Dream Play (1901).  “In 1986, I was to direct Strindberg’s A Dream Play for the fourth time, a decision that seemed good” (35), even though the three earlier attempts had “come to grief” or “turned out poor” or “been ruined” (36).  But this time, despite the small stage, pregnant lead actress (the great Lena Olin), and heartbroken stage designer, Bergman tries again, as certain kinds of artists do.

I wanted the audience to experience the stench of the backyard of the Advocate’s office, the cold beauty  of Fagervik’s  summer countryside in snow, the sulphorous mist and glint of hell in Skamsund and the magnificent flowers round the Rising Castle, the old theatre behind the theatre corridor.  (36)

Hang on, I want to return to that stage designer.

The designer’s lips trembled and he looked at me with his slightly protruding eyes.  ‘I want her to come back,’ he whispered.  I did not embark on a cure of souls and persisted, but a few weeks later, he broke down and said that he couldn’t cope, after which he packed his bags and returned to Gothenburg, where he hoisted sail and went to sea with a new lover.  (36)

Someday a Swedish director will make a film based on this chapter.

In A Dream Play Indra’s Daughter (an Indian deity) descends to earth to experience humanity.  The first thing she see is that Rising Castle, a flower-like structure steadily growing out of a pile of manure, the primary sex-and-dirt image in this play.

DAUGHTER:  Tell me, Father, why do flowers grow out of dirt?

GLAZIER [piously].  Because they don’t like the dirt, so they hasten up into the light, to flower and die. (181, pages from the OUP edition)

This is not Strindberg’s answer.  The goddess plunges into the muck, experiencing love, marriage, poverty, and so on, accompanied by a number of Strindbergish figures, until she reasserts her godhood and brings the play to a close in a Prospero-like manner, in verse, even.

DAUGHTER.
Our parting is at hand, the end approaches;
Farewell you child of man, you dreamer,
You poet who understands best how to live;
Hovering on wings above the earth,
You dive at times into the mire
To graze against it, not fasten in it!  (246)

Bergman worries over scene after scene.  “[T]he unhappy coal-heavers are a taxing affair.”  In the Fingal’s Cave scene characters “declaim beautiful and worthless verses about each other, the vilest and the most lovely side by side” (39).  That scene climaxes in a shipwreck and a vision of Christ walking on the water; it involves one of the strangest mixes of tone I have ever seen, equal to the most baffling parts of Goethe’s Faust. 

The rising waves threaten to drown them in the cave.

DAUGHTER.  If only I were sure it is a ship…

POET.  To tell you the truth…  I don’t think it is a ship... it is a two-storied house, with trees outside… and… a telephone tower…  A tower reaching up into the skies…  It is the modern Tower of Babel, sending its wires up there – to communicate with those above…

DAUGHTER.  Child, human thoughts need no metal wires to transmit themselves; ––– The prayers of the devout make their way through every world…  That is certainly no Tower of Babel, for if you would storm heaven, then storm it with your prayers.  (234-5, ellipses all Strindberg’s)

Have I just copied out a chunk of Swedenborg, updated for the age of telephony?  The characters at this point pop back out in the theater to witness the satirical argument of the Deans – “The following scene in the theatre corridor is dull and says nothing, but cannot be excluded” (Bergman, 40).

Of course the production is a failure, as was, on a smaller scale my reading of the play.  “So much effort, pain, anxiety, tedium, hope, all to no avail” (51).  This was Bergman’s last try, with this play, not with Strindberg.  Not mine, though, not yet.

'To me it’s among the greatest works in the history of drama,’ I replied truthfully - poor suffering actors - some Ghost Sonata

Four more days on August Strindberg, I promise, and I already have no idea what I want to say.

Strindberg is weird and I barely understand him.  Some of his plays, or large parts of them, are obviously immensely effective theatrical art.  Then other sections, even in the same play, are baffling, cryptic, tedious, didactic – name your sin.  The “dream plays” – A Dream Play, To Damascus, The Ghost Sonata – abandon ordinary narrative logic and structure, which leaves Strindberg free to write as a genuine visionary writer, but also allows him to spew some pretty dubious nonsense.

Then there are Strindberg’s ideas, about women, marriage,  and sex, particularly, that occasionally take some pretty appalling turns but are always –and remember I have only read eight plays, but within those, I do mean “always” – redeemed by an irony or reversal so fierce that the original terrible idea is at least challenged and sometimes demolished.  The latter effect is impressive.

Or so it seems to me.  Here is Ingmar Bergman, who is directing The Ghost Sonata:

At my side was a tiny little creature, or possibly a ghost, the grand old lady of the theatre.  Maria Schildknecht, dressed up in the parrot dress and hideous mask of the Mummy.  ‘I assume you are Mr Bergman,’ she whispered, smiling kindly but terrifyingly.  I confirmed my identity and bowed awkwardly.  We stood in silence for a few moments.  ‘Well, what do you think of this then?’ said the little ghost, her voice stern and challenging.  ‘To me it’s among the greatest works in the history of drama,’ I replied truthfully.  The Mummy looked at me with cold contempt.  ‘Oh,’ she said.  ‘This is the kind of shit Strindberg knocked up so that we should have something to play at his Intimate Theatre.’  She left me with a gracious nod…  Imperishable, in a role she hated under a producer she hated.  (Ch. 12 of The Magic Lantern, italics added)

So there are differences of opinion.  This is her part:

MUMMY [like a baby]. Why are you opening the dawer; didn’t I twell you to keep it cwosed?...
BENGTSSON  [also babbling like a baby].  Ta, ta, ta, ta!  Ittle lolly must be nice now, then she’ll get a sweetie! – Pretty Polly!
MUMMY [like a parrot].  Pretty Polly!  Is Jacob there?  Currrrre!
BENGTSSON.  She thinks she’s a parrot.  Maybe she is…  [To the MUMMY]  Come on, Polly!  Give us a whistle!
The MUMMY whistles.  (Scene 2, tr. Michael Robinson, Oxford World’s Classics, p. 266, italics in original)

Actors sometimes have to suffer for our entertainment.  She gets her revenge by the end of the scene, though.

MUMMY.  [opens the closet door]  Now the clock has struck! – Get up and go into the closet where I’ve been sitting mourning our misdeed for twenty years – You’ll find a rope in there like the  one with which you strangled the Consul upstairs, and with which you thought to strangle your benefactor…  Go!
[The OLD MAN goes into the closet]
MUMMY  [Closing the door].  Bengtsson!  Put up the screen!  The death screen!  (Sc. 2, italics in original)

I am making Strindberg sound like Alfred Jarry here, a writer of nightmare gibberish.  The Mummy whistles.  The death screen!  And this isn’t the craziest stuff.

There was no hairpin, but I saw it - a week of August Strindberg

This is where I spend a week writing about an author about whom I knew close to nothing a month, or let’s say a year ago, and now I’m some kinda expert.  It’s August Strindberg week!  This’ll be fun!  He was nuts!

He really was somethin’ else.  I will do my best to avoid anything biographical, because that really is all secondhand for me, and at least I did read some of the plays for myself, but I understand the temptation.  What family drama, what wild swings of opinion, what invective.  After a crisis of confidence in his marriage and writing and beliefs Strindberg spent five years working on science.  What science?  Creating gold!  He was an actual alchemist, in the 1890s.  He’s a character in a John Crowley novel.

The sheer bulk of Strindberg’s writing is hard to understand.  He wrote something like eighty plays, of which I have now read eight, and only the most famous. He wrote novels, short stories, history, popular science, and rants.  Elias Canetti, in his memoir A Tongue Set Free, described his mother’s obsessive reading of Strindberg – this was during and after World War I, so after Strindberg’s death.  Teenage Canetti would buy his mother every volume of Strindberg he could find, assiduously avoiding glancing at the contents because his mother forbid it.  Canetti’s book gave me my first hint of what Strindberg meant to people outside of the theater.

No, the first hint, which I did not understand, came from Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography The Magic Lantern (1987).  Bergman constantly returned to Strindberg throughout his life, in his films, his reading, and especially in the theater:

When I was twelve, I was allowed to accompany a musician who was playing the celeste backstage in Strindberg’s A Dream Play.  It was a searing experience.  Night after night, hidden in the proscenium tower, I witnessed the marriage scene between the Advocate and the Daughter.  It was the first time I had experienced the magic of acting.  The Advocate held a hairpin between his thumb and forefinger, he twisted it, straightened it out and broke it.  There was no hairpin, but I saw it.  The Officer was backstage waiting for his entrance, leaning forward at his shoes, his hands behind his back.  He cleared his throat soundlessly, a perfectly ordinary person.  Then he opened the door and stepped into the limelight.  He was changed, transformed: he was the Officer.  (Ch.4, tr. Joan Tate)

I suppose this story has happened to many children at many different plays, but how appropriate that it was this play, one where the theatrical illusion is constantly violated.  The result was a life of the highest creativity that was suffused with Strindberg.

Here is what I read, by the way, the material for the next few days.  This is a good time to let me know what I should have read not instead of but of course in addition to these.  Always in addition.

The Father (1887) – terrific, intense, deeply misogynist, and yet…

Miss Julie (1888) – as a bonus, it has a preface as hilarious as those of Zola.

To Damascus I & II (1898) – these are oddities, but boy do they explain a lot.

The Dance of Death I (1901) – I saw Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen do this one in 2001 or 2002.  Was that ever fun.

A Dream Play (1901) – Bergman has a funny section describing the impossibility of doing this play, yet he tries again and again.

To Damascus III (1904) – more of the above.

The Ghost Sonata (1907) – short, concentrated, pure; Strindberg aspiring to the condition if music.

This will give me something to do.