The new drama?

John Mortimer

Strindberg. The Plays. Introduced and translated by Michael Meyer. In two volumes (Seeker and Warburg £6.50 each) Up to the middle of the last century the dramatist presented himself as the reasonable man of moderation — the sort of character of sterling common sense that his audience was flattered into believing it also represented. The playwright was grieved at the crimes of Clytemnestra and Lady Macbeth "But you and I, gentlemen," said Shakespeare and Aeschylus, "Would never perpetrate such enormities, neither would we be as foolishly comic as Malvolio or Sir Epicure Mammon, as scoundrely as Volpone or Tartuffe. And as for the great tragic heroes — their downfall was to be lamented but it proceeded from a fatal flaw in the character which you and I are happily without." Othello has a noble mind, poisoned by the small seed of jealousy. The author watches the action, greatly saddened but no more personally involved than the ambassador, sent to report to Venice.

All that changed after 22 January, 1849, when Johan August Strindberg arrived as the fourth child of a bankrupt shipping merchant and his former maidservant. The modern theatre was born, with the dramatist no longer as Ludovico but passionate, irrational and as fatally jealous as Othello himself.

The triumph of the id in the theatre was not, of course, total or immediate. Ibsen still presented himself as the man of reason, with tenable beliefs in Women's Lib and the non-pollution_ of public baths. Shaw was rational to the point of mischievous ecstasy, and the well-made playwrights from Pinero to Sir Terence Rattigan continued to play the role of common-sensical clubmen with liberal sympathies. But the movement of modern drama has been, surely, a flight from reason, into the terrifying abyss of Beckett or the irrational fears of Pinter. John Osborne's heroes rail against the world with all their author's eloquence and passion; but Jimmy Porter and Archie Rice are not reasonable men. They live in a different world from Shakespeare and Montaigne: their anger is at best an expression of the hopelessly absurd facts of existence, at worst a scream of paranoia. They are in Strindberg's world, which makes for deeply painful living and, of course, magnificently effective theatre.

If Shakespeare took his view of life from the tolerant French philosopher whose continual question was, "What do I know?', Strindberg came in from the cold wind of atheism to the even bleaker `Heaven and Hell' of Emmanuel Swedenborg — and it was, of course, the hell which the dramatist made his special territory.

"Swedenborg's hell," Strindberg wrote to a poet friend who was about to enter an asylum (not a very comforting letter for such an occasion) "is an exact description of life on earth," and reassuring his friend of the value of his mental illness he added, "Hallucinations and delirium present a certain kind of reality — or they are phantasmagoria designed by the Invisible One to frighten us. They all have symbolic meaning." This may be the first statement of the modern literary belief in the positive value of derangement; and the attack

on—ffie rational man, who lives without delusions, as a kind of mental philistine. Ibsen

tolerantly allowed men their fantasies: Strindberg fiercely asserted their right to their hallucinations.

Strindberg's fierce indentification with his tormented protagonists has two consequences.

He had no patience with literary "characters" which the author may stand aside and observe with amused detachment — such creations he thought to be a product of the "bourgeois idea

of the immutability of the soul". "A 'character' became a man in a mould," he wrote in the

preface to Miss Julie, to establish whom it was only necessary to equip with some physical defect such as a club foot or. ... or else some oft repeated phrase such as, "Barkis is willin' " or "Absolutely first rate!" Secondly the audience had to enter the theatre as ready as a religious congregation to suspend the use of reason. In fact Strindberg gave a special welcome to those classes he regarded as irrational. "The theatre has always been a primary school for the young, the semi-educated and women, all of whom retain the humble faculty of being able to deceive themselves and let themselves be deceived — in other words accept the illusion and react to the suggestion of the author." He was nothing if not a brave writer: anyone suggesting that the Royal Court existed for the benefit of the semi-educated and women would risk immediate suspension from a lamp post in Sloane Square. But robbed of male-chauvinist hyperbole the sentence does express a real truth about modern drama: it's a theatre which requires you to check your reason in with your overcoat.

The abandonment of reason doesn't, of course, mean any retreat from emotional truth. Strindberg regarded women with a mixture of violent attraction and hysterical terror. It's not as reasonable as Ibsen's plea for women's rights, but it's probably much nearer to the way men feel. His view of marriage was defined by his mentor Swedenborg — "Some marriages are called 'marriages of hell'. Partners can talk to each other, and may even be drawn to each other through lust; but inwardly they burn with a murderous mutual hatred which is so great that it cannot be described." This is not a rational view, but it no doubt expresses the truth of many sanctified unions. Strindberg hated the common sense approach to women's rights because, to him, it was a lie in the face of his intense emotional experience. The supreme liar was Ibsen, who roused Strindberg to a greater fever of hatred than any of his wives. "The day 'The Father' kills 'Hedda Gabler'," he wrote, "I shall stick a gun in that old Troll's throat." He also wanted to know what would have happened in The Doll's House if the husband had received a little justice — and would have liked Captain Alving alive to refute to the audience all the lies his wife told about him — a version of Ghosts which John Osborne might one day feel like writing.

In moments of lucidity Strindberg realised thqt his misogyny was entirely theoretical and that he couldn't live a day without "warming his soul at the flame of women's unconscious, vegetable way of life." His output in marriages and love affairs was as prolific as his extraordinary production of plays (he wrote seventeen, including The Dance of Death, in three years).

Although he could be a charming and amusing companion Strindberg was endlessly contemptuous of plays which were meant to bring joy to the audience by portraying the world as a place "peopled by cheerful lunatics with an insatiable passion for dancing." He himself found the joy of life in its "cruel and mighty conflicts" and the exhilaration his best work brings is not that it's intelligent, like much of life it's totally absurd: but that it's absolutely true. It's by facing the irrational truth cv existence that the writer and his characters achieve such peace as they ever

know. "Is life serious or just a hoax?" says the Captain in The Dance of Death. "When it's a farce it can be a nightmare, when it's serious it can be quite soothing and tolerable. But when You finally decide to play it serious, someone always comes along and treats you like a clown." It's not the voice of reason: but it's the true voice of experience hardly won, and it's the voice of modern drama.

Mr Michael Meyer has done the theatre huge service by his translations of Strindberg which make you feel that you are not reading translations at all. The plays are published with Prefaces by Mr Meyer which brilliantly illuminate both the texts and the life and mind of their extraordinary author. These are books of enormous value, not only to the small audience of playreaders but to all those seeking to understand the mind of man in this century.