August Strindberg

Uh, at least as far as I'm aware.

Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg.

Uh, you did do a Pinter I think in Williamstown with-

That's right

I've lived in this room since I was a tiny baby, and that was forty-three years ago.

I call it my glass bubble because of something Strindberg wrote that I've always remembered.

"Living alone in a single room produces a strange feeling of almost morbid intensity, like being inside a glass bubble." So you see.

It was in this very room, snuggled on this very bed, when at the age of twenty-eight, I woke in the middle of the night with the certain knowledge that my father, who had been ill for quite a long time, was dead.

One's self cannot live happily without other selves with whom to share the chancy business of living, but sharing is not the same as owning or being owned.

One must belong to no one and nothing but one's self, for what one shares with other selves is worth little or nothing at all.

[ominous music] Curled up here in my glass bubble, my knees pulled up to my chin and my eyes closed tight, I strive with all my will to induce the feeling of morbid intensity that Strindberg described and so often experienced within his own glass bubble.

It will not come.

You know, Dramaten is the best theater school in the world for a naturalistic actor.

You know, she's doing Strindberg and Ibsen.

Uh, and Stiller is one of the great directors of silent film, and Pabst, uh, was also a great director.

H- his career suffered sorta later.

And this gets to o-one of the m- sort of core observations that is important for us to take through in our study of the five is, uh, this polarity between hypersensitivity and insensitivity in the personality.

And, uh, Naranjo says here, "I think we may say the individual is characterized by an exaggerated vulnerability and by a self-protective distancing from his excessively fine and vulnerable feelings." I quote Kretschmer again, "He alone, however, has the key to the sc- schizoid temperament, who has clearly recognized that the majority of schizoids are not either oversensitive or cold, but they are oversensitive and cold at the same time, and indeed in quite different relational mixtures." Uh, and he goes on with sort of various types, but Naranjo says, um, he finds individuals like Strindberg, who said of himself, "I'm hard as ice and yet so full of feeling that I'm almost sentimental." But even in that half of our material, which is primarily cold and poor in affective response, as soon as we come into close personal contact with such schizoids, we find very frequently behind the affectless numbed exterior, in the innermost sanctuary, a tender personality nucleus with the most vulnerable nervous sensitivity, which has withdrawn into itself and lies there contorted.

Now, that's very powerful.

A tender personality nucleus, uh, almost, I i- almost imagine almost fetal or very, very young, withdrawn into the innermost sanctuary and lies there contorted.

So Naranjo continues, "The unsociable or autistic characteristics of his schizoid, um, is something that could be understood either in relation to hypersensitivity or to insensitivity toward, towards others, as in the case of those sensitive natures that seek as far as possible to avoid and deaden all stimulation from the outside.

They close the shutters of their houses in order to lead a dream life fantastic, poor in deeds and rich in thought," that's Holderlin, "in the soft, muffled gloom of the interior.

They seek loneliness," as Strindberg so beautifully said of himself, "in order to spin themselves into the silk of their own souls." Kretschmer's view on schizothymia or thymia was further elaborated by Sheldon, who endorsed Kretschmer's threefold conception of human constitution.

Okay, well, here we get into the really wild, you know, asthenic body build, ectomorphia, cerebertonia.

Trapped together in their isolation, the captain, bitter at his lack of promotion, his wife frustrated at having been forced to give up her career as an actress, the couple occupy their empty hours tearing into each other in a brutal dance of mutual cruelty.

This is August Strindberg's scorching portrait of marital strife, The Dance of Death.

The play was written in early 1900, but not seen on the stage in Sweden until 1909, when Strindberg's own Intimate Theatre presented it in Stockholm.

According to the memoir of the actor who played the captain in this production, Strindberg often said that The Dance of Death was his best play.

But the production received a mixed response from the Swedish critics, one suggesting that with the various pathologies on display, a hospital theater would be the most appropriate locale for The Dance of Death.

However, the play was the Intimate Theatre's biggest success, running for 85 performances, and it has had a lasting influence.

Arthur Miller dubbed Strindberg the mad inventor of modern theater, and echoes of his unflinching dissection of extreme emotional discord can be seen in the plays of Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, and John Osborne, while his formal challenge to the decorum of naturalism inspired modernists such as Brecht and Beckett.

So I'm delighted to essay our first Strindberg play for the podcast, inspired by a wonderful new production of Dance of Death that I saw at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames earlier this year.

We did Chekhov.

We did Strindberg.

We did modern-day playwrights.

We did a lot of Tracy Letts.