Strindberg's revolutionary play

Mäster Olof

My first encounter with Strindberg on stage was at Gothenburg Civic Theatre in 1958. They were showing Mäster Olof - which is translated as Master Olof but I would prefer to call it Father Olof, since it is about a monk who breaks away from the Catholic church and follows in Luther’s footsteps.
It is a play which has been revised endlessly and Strindberg wrote three different versions of it. The prose version, which is perhaps considered the best, was finished in 1872. Two years later he wrote another version which is partly in verse, and in 1876 he finished the verse drama on the same character. It took nine years before the play was produced on stage in Sweden. The cast list is huge and I can understand why foreign companies shy away from a production for that reason, but it is fascinating play of ideas in Ibsen’s and Schiller’s vein, and it works on two levels. On the one hand it is a play about the priest Olof who studied under Martin Luther in Germany and who returned to Sweden in 1518 with revolutionary ideas about the church. He wanted to fight ‘the spiritual death and corruption in the Catholic church’. With the help of the king, Gustav Vasa, he brought about the Reformation in Sweden. At the time when Strindberg started work on this play there was another strong movement gathering momentum in Europe and, undoubtedly, Strindberg was referring to the rise of Socialism in Mäster Olof. Like Luther, Olof falls in love with a nun and marries her, thus breaking the law of celibacy. Olof’s wife, Kristina, is portrayed as an unusually gentle and yet strong woman. She stands by her husband, but at the same time, she points out the importance of appreciating flowers and birds. The lofty ideals must not eradicate the real values in life. She represents a kind of Francis of Assisi in her naivety and all-embracing love.

KRISTINA:
Are you too grand to look at a flower or listen to a bird? Olof, I put the flowers on your table for you to rest your eyes on , but you ask the maid to take them away because they give you a headache, you say. I wanted to break the silence when you were engrossed in your work so I offered you birdsong, but you call it shrieking. I asked you to come in for dinner a short while ago, but you didn’t have time. I wanted to talk to you, but you don’t have time. You despise this small reality and yet you have placed me in it. You don’t want to elevate me, but then spare me your contempt at least. I shall remove everything that might disturb your thoughts. I shall leave you in peace and keep myself and my rubbish away from you. (She throws the flowers out of the window, takes the birdcage and is about to leave the room)
OLOF:
Kristina, my child, forgive me! You don’t understand!

The play lasts for six hours if performed in its entirety. It took Dramaten another nine years before they put it on. They chose the verse play. In 1887 while the Strindbergs were living in southern Germany August asked his brother Axel to sell the original manuscript. It brought in a much needed 500 kronor and Strindberg wrote to his brother in a desperate but jocular tone:
‘Well, now I have sold everything that can be sold. The only thing remaining is my corpse (and above all the skull) which I donate to Medical Science.’
But soon after he sat down to write his most popular novel, The People of Hemsö, which became a huge success.

Strindberg and Music

Strindberg and Music

Strindberg came from a musical family. Two of his siblings. Axel and Anna, became professional musicians although his sister gave up her career when she married Hugo von Philp. Axel later set to music several of August’s poems and was the key player during the so-called Beethoven evenings towards the end of his life when a group of friends gathered in his apartment at Drottninggatan to play music and enjoy a late supper.

 Strindberg did not have any formal musical training, unlike the rest of his siblings, but he managed to teach himself to play several instruments:  piano, flute, mandolin, guitar, cornet.

During his many travels he would bring his guitar and sing at social gatherings.

While he was still living at home his favourite composers were Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart. Later on, while he was living in Berlin at the beginning of the 1890’s he also came to love Chopin and Schumann  who were introduced to him through the Polish writer and amateur musician Prsybyszewski. Schumann’s rousing piece, Aufschwung, became a favourite of his. 

During his more melancholy years in Paris leading up to his ‘Inferno crisis’ music became his greatest comfort and one of his friends has told us how Strindberg used to visit another Swedish expat, fru Sophie Kjellberg, who lived in Montparnasse. She would play Bach, Grieg and Sinding for him and often Strindberg would turn up before Sophie had cleared away the dishes after dinner. Strindberg was so keen to start the musical enjoyment that he would volunteer to dry the dishes to speed up proceedings. Algot Ruhe writes: ‘He sat on a wicker chair without a back rest in the middle of the floor and undertook his chosen task under bizarre monologues. When it was all done, fru Kjellberg went over to her pianino which almost occupied the whole of one of the small rooms. On the other side of the wall, behind the pianino, there was a small sofa and in the corner of that sofa Strindberg would sit for hours, alone in the dark, listening to the music.’

As soon as he had put down roots in Stockholm again in 1899 Strindberg hired a piano and started his ‘Beethoven evenings’ which continued until a few months before his death in 1912.

Even though his brother Axel and his new friend Tor Aulin, the composer, tried to introduce him to different composers Strindberg was not very keen on Brahms and he hated Wagner whom he called ‘the musical representative of Evil’.  The music should be emotional, passionate, stirring. Purely romantic music did not cut any ice with Strindberg.

Music plays an important role in Strindberg’s later dramatic works. In fact, The Chamber Plays have borrowed their title and format from chamber music. It is significant that all his wives and his last love, Fanny Falkner, were very good pianists. After the divorce from Harriet he asked his sister, Anna, to come and play for him. Music had a soothing and healing effect on Strindberg. It was almost a religious feeling. When Tor Aulin and Axel three months before Strindberg’s death  played The Eroica and Schumann’s third symphony for him, Strindberg commented on that evening in a birthday card to Aulin  with immense gratitude:  ‘From Saul to David’.

Strindberg and others: Strindberg raped

Strindberg and others: Strindberg raped: Mies Julie I have just been to see the much praised South African production of Mies Julie, set in a desolate farmland district in Sou...

Strindberg raped

Mies Julie

I have just been to see the much praised South African production of Mies Julie, set in a desolate farmland district in South Africa with a black John and a white Julie. Christine is John’s mother in this production and there is also an old woman with her face painted white, walking around and making some exotic Xhosa sounds with an instrument similar to a mouth organ. She represents ‘Ancestor’.

The bare stage, apart from a rather tatty kitchen table and chairs, a bucket and a whole row of dirty wellies lined up at the back, invoked an unglamorous hard-working farm.

Hilda Cronje, who plays Julie, circles around John and Christine, at a loss what to do, angry, dishevelled even from the beginning of the play and gives the impression of a cat on heat.

The plot has been adapted to suit South African circumstances and the resentment between John and Julie  works very well, but the director - who also calls herself the writer of this piece - has done away with all subtleties, which means that the flirtatious scenes at the beginning of the play are gone and the eroticism has been replaced by brute force. The simulated rape scene, which took place in front of the audience, was almost unbearable to watch. After that drawn-out violent scene Julie puts her hand on her crutch and produces a bloody hand which is supposed to indicate that she was a virgin. She spits in John’s face, he handles her physically like a slave and she brandishes a sickle which she finally uses in order to miscarry.

I walked away thinking Strindberg had been raped as well. Everything except the violence had been peeled away and what was left was a brutal, unsubtle, but maybe truthful picture of South Africa during and after Apartheid. I doubt that Strindberg would have approved, though, but, on the other hand, it is remarkable that this play still manages to engage and shock. I think where it failed, as far as I am concerned, is that Julie was never the lady in this production. She looked like a wayward child, picked up from the gutter. The problem with that is that she had nowhere to go. There was no real fall. The count was never a threat either. His riding boots with spurs had been abandoned and John was polishing some sturdy shoes instead. No bell announced the count’s arrival at the end and that, in turn, meant that there was no urgency to get away or commit suicide. Here, Julie produced a bucket full of  ‘blood’ when she stuck her sickle up her vagina. To underline the message Christine then turns up with a bucket of blood as well which she pours into the drain. Julie’s dog had also miscarried.

The production was very bleak, and black and white in more than one sense.

Siri Strindberg as a budding actress

When practical obstacles or family problems stand in the way for my writing 

I often think about the Herculean task that Siri von Essen took on when she set her mind to become an actress. Everything seemed to go against her at the beginning, but she was unswerving in her determination and did not let anything stop her. With that kind of inner strength she was to become an ideal companion for Strindberg for many years to come. She has often been dismissed as a poor or not very good actress by people who have not bothered to go back to the sources, but the reviews and eyewitnesses speak a different story.

After her divorce from Baron Carl Gustaf Wrangel she took lessons from a voice coach and a drama teacher and she worked hard at eradicating her Finland-Swedish accent. Meanwhile, Sigrid, her young daughter, was ill with meningitis which developed into pneumonia. The day for Siri’s debut performance as an actress was set for 27 January 1877 and on 13 January her daughter died. On 19 January she was buried. Siri’s mother insinuated that it could be God’s punishment. Under these truly awful circumstances Siri made her long-awaited debut on the stage of The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.The newspaper Aftonbladet singled her out and wrote: ‘Mrs von Essen shows more promise than  usual for a beginner. She moves with ease and has stillness; her gestures are economical, but have the desired effect when used; her voice is clear and pleasant, although it drops in volume occasionally; it possesses a sensitive and varied expression, but you can sometimes detect a slight Finnish accent. It is so slight, though, that it could easily be eradicated with a bit of effort. Her ability to hold an animated conversation with a good sense of timing is remarkable, but she is not as successful in her exclamations or asides; her face, on the other hand, is capable of more varied expressions than many an experienced actor. That applies especially to her eyes; and her presence is graceful if somewhat weak in certain scenes.‘

The two other major morning papers, Stockholms Dagblad and  Dagens Nyheter also praised her talent and Dagens Nyheter emphasized her naturalness and beauty. All the critics seemed to agree that she moved gracefully and had a very pleasant voice. She was called in three times after the curtain call. After this initial success she was offered the lead in Charlotte Birch-Pfeisser’s play Jane Eyre. Again Siri had to battle with personal problems while preparing for a huge part. Her mother died during the run and since she was without siblings it was up to her to deal with the funeral and disperse of the contents of the family home.

Miraculously, she pulled through and was offered a one-year contract at The Royal Dramatic Theatre but when she came back after the summer break she was pregnant again, but continued working until the end of the year. Strindberg and Siri got married on 30 December and the child, who was called Kerstin, was born, on 24 January 1878 and died the same day. Kerstin was buried on 27 January and eight days later Siri was back on stage in the same role that she had been playing before Christmas. 

A few happy years followed when they both develeoped as artists and enjoyed success in their chosen fields. Eleven years Siri was to give her last professional performance as an actress in Copenhagen. Her part that time was Lady Julie.

Strindberg and Love is now available as an e-book. It is published by Amber Lane Press and sold through Amazon. 

Strindberg and others: Strindberg's three foreign wives

Strindberg and others: Strindberg's three foreign wives: It is strange to think that Strindberg, who revolutionized the Swedish language, chose three wives who in different ways st...

Strindberg's three foreign wives

It is strange to think that Strindberg, who revolutionized the Swedish language, chose three wives who in different ways struggled with the language. Siri von Essen, his first wife, had grown up in Finland speaking French with her mother and Swedish with her father but since she had no formal education she never learnt to spell properly in Swedish and Strindberg often had to correct her spelling. Also, when she started working as an actress, she had a Finland-Swedish accent which was not acceptable on the Swedish stage at that time. She worked hard at trying to eradicate that accent and it is dubious whether she ever got rid of it altogether.

Frida Uhl, Strindberg’s second wife, set out to learn Swedish. She even suggested that Strindberg’s eldest daughter Karin should come and live with them in order to teach her Swedish. Frida’s letters from England in 1894 show that she made some attempts at least to pick up vocabulary but the marriage did not last long enough for her to make any serious progress. She was fluent in French and English, and German was her native tongue, so given the right circumstances she probably could have mastered Swedish well enough to translate Strindberg’s works into German, as was her intention.

Harriet Bosse, Strindberg’s third wife, was born in Norway and lived in Norway until her mid teens so when she arrived in Sweden she was told by various theatre producers that she needed to master ’King’s Swedish’ before she could hope for major parts.  When she auditioned at Dramaten the Artistic Director said that he would only employ her when she had learnt to speak like a normal person, i.e. without a Norwegian accent. Harriet spent two months with a voice coach, working intensively at her pronunciation and intonation and after that she was offered her first part at Dramaten. She continued to struggle with the language for a long time after that and complained that the Swedish language ’did not want to get into my head, which is understandable, because  I previously spoke the most beautiful language in the world.’ But Harriet was stubborn and ambitious and she felt sure that one day she would master the Swedish language and speak like a native. For a long time she conversed in Norwegian with her sisters but in the end she gave in and spoke Swedish in private as well.