A Dream Play (NHB Classic Plays) E-Book

August Strindberg

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Caryl Churchill's spare and resonant version of Strindberg's enigmatic masterpiece. Written in 1901, a mysterious amalgam of Freud, Alice in Wonderland and Strindberg's own private symbolism, A Dream Play follows the logic of a dream: A young woman comes from another world to see if life is really as difficult as people make it out to be. Characters merge into each other, locations change in an instant and a locked door becomes an obsessive recurrent image. As Strindberg wrote in his preface, he wanted 'to imitate the disjointed yet seemingly logical shape of a dream. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist.' From a literal translation by Charlotte Barslund. Introduction by Caryl Churchill. 'elegant yet funereal and, like dreams, paradoxically serene and fraught'- Independent on Sunday '100 minutes of disconcerting theatrical brilliance... spellbinding'- Daily Telegraph

Leseprobe

AUGUST

STRINDBERG

A DREAM PLAY

in a new version by

CARYL CHURCHILL

from a literal translation by Charlotte Barslund with an Introduction by Caryl Churchill

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Original Production

Author’s Note

Characters

A Dream Play

About the Authors

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Is it a larder? Is it a fridge? Is it more fun, more vivid, or even more true to what Strindberg meant, to update the larder door which is just like the ones the Officer saw when he was a child? A larder’s where the food is, so does a fridge give us more directly, without archaism, the promise of satisfaction of appetite? And make it easier to see why the characters hope that if they finally get the door open they’ll find the meaning of life inside? Or is it a silly idea and a modernism too far?

You don’t of course consciously think all that, you think ‘fridge’ and smile. I did this version for Katie Mitchell, who was already planning to direct it at the National Theatre, and she had said she welcomed anachronisms. So when the happy couple decide to kill themselves because bliss doesn’t last (‘Life is wretched. I pity mankind.’), I could write, ‘People are so fucked up.’

There’s a strand of the play that is about academia, and that’s where I’ve done the most updating. The university and its bossy deans of theology, philosophy, medicine and law don’t have the power over us that they seemed to have over Strindberg. Here a bishop, psychoanalyst, scientist and barrister are on the committee of the inquiry looking into the opening of the door, and the solicitor is refused not a doctorate but a knighthood. Not a big change, and on the whole this version stays close to the original.

What I’ve mostly done is tighten the dialogue and cut out a few chunks. Strindberg lived in a far more Christian society than ours, and his swipes at it look a bit unnecessary now, so I’ve taken some of them out. Though, with a Christian prime minister and an American president voted in by right-wing Christians both calling us to fight evil, perhaps we should feel as dominated by religion as Strindberg did. Still, we don’t, so I’m not restoring those cuts. I’ve cut references to the Flying Dutchman and the Caliph Haroun; I’ve cut things that seemed repetitive; sometimes I’ve cut bits that just seemed to me or Katie not to work very well. And I’ve cut the meaning of life.

When it turns out there’s nothing behind the fridge door, the daughter of the gods promises the writer she’ll tell him the secret when they’re alone. What she says may have seemed more original or daring when Strindberg wrote it, but seems a bit of an anticlimax to us. So in this version she whispers it to the writer and we never know what it is. But was telling us the meaning of life one of the main points of the play for Strindberg? I hope not. I do feel abashed at cutting another writer’s work; directors have fewer qualms.

I said the version was close to the original but of course I’ve no idea what the original is as I don’t know any Swedish. The very few translations I’ve done before have been from French or Latin, where I knew enough to see what the text was literally saying. I’d never wanted to work from a literal translation of a language I didn’t know. To my surprise, the one I was given wasn’t literally literal, the kind of thing I’d done for myself at first when translating Latin, with odd word order and odd words, but a translation, by Charlotte Barslund, which seemed to me as performable as the existing translations I’d looked at. So that for me is the original I’ve kept close to.

People who are looking at this text after seeing Katie Mitchell’s production may or may not find considerable differences. Working as she has before, she and the actors may add other material or change the order of scenes, or they may end up very close to this text. I’ve put in Strindberg’s stage directions, which are what Katie and designer Vicki Mortimer are starting from, rather than describing their solutions, since other productions may want to use this text and come up with their own versions of stage doors, caves and quarantine stations. When Strindberg was writing the play a castle was being built in Stockholm and grew over the trees, and the town was full of soldiers. The equivalent fast-growing buildings for us are office towers; a soldier means our current wars to us, not the romantic officer of the play; our city towers are full of businessmen. So we’ve gone for a tower, which works well both ways – prisoners are kept in towers – and for a while we went with a Banker instead of an Officer. Katie’s staying with the Banker but I’ve gone back to the Officer for this text, feeling as with the stage directions that I shouldn’t put too much of the production into it. I’ve kept the fridge though – if you’re not happy with anachronism feel free to go back to the larder.

I’d read the play several times over the years, admired the way it moved, but never, I realise, taken in the detail. I was surprised by its tenderness. Since starting this version I’ve learned more about Strindberg than I knew before. I suppose I’d thought of him as misogynistic and depressive and mostly concerned with miserable relationships and disastrous families. All of which of course you can find in A Dream Play. I hadn’t realised how political he was, that he was a hero to trade unionists, who made a detour in a parade to pass his window. When asked what mattered to him most he said, ‘Disarmament.’ He added the coal-miner scene (building workers here) after the play was finished, because there was a miners’ strike in Stockholm.

I’m not sure how I’d feel if someone treated one of my plays the way I’ve treated Strindberg’s, even though I hope I’ve made it clearer and not spoilt it. I wouldn’t like it now, but perhaps when a play is over a hundred years old you should just be glad it’s still being done. And it survives unharmed in Swedish. I’d like to think he’d be glad about this version. I’d like to make him smile. But maybe he’d say, ‘Oh woe. Life is wretched.’

Caryl Churchill