The Chamber Plays [antikvár]

INTRODUCnOîiSeveral times in his career Strindberg dreamed of establishing his own theatre. This dream was first realized in 1889 when Strindberg and his wife established in Copenhagen a Scandinavian counterpart to Antoine's Théâtre Libre, the home of naturalistic drama. Although two of Strindberg's finest works, Miss Julie and Creditors, were staged at the Copenhagen theatre, the amateurish acting, highlighted by Strindberg's wife playing Miss Julie in a subdued fashion in order not to arouse her jealous husband peeping at her from the wings, turned the venture into a fiasco. WiAin a week it was laughed out of existence.Eighteen years later the results were somewhat better. In 1906 August Falck, a young and enterprising actor, toured the Swedish provinces with his production of Miss Julie and finally brought it to Stockholm. This was the first time that the notorious play had been seen in the capital, and its warm reception revived Strindberg's flagging interest in the drama. He met witii Falck, and together they rented, in the summer of 1907, a store which was renovated as a theatre seating 161 persons and named the Intimate Theatre.But before they had even found a location, Strindberg had written four plays especially for this new theatre. Though he had a desk full of his own unproduced scripts (a result of his having glutted the Swedish market with the twenty-odd plays he wrote between 1898 and 1903), his genius was fired by the very thought of having his ovm theatre in which he would be free to experiment. When he set to work on the first of these plays, he already had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted: a playintimate in form; a simple theme treated with thoroughness; few characters; vast perspectives; freely imaginative, but built on observations, experiences, carefully studied; simple, but not too simple; no huge apparatus; no superfluous minor parts; none of those "old machines" or five-acters built according to thevii