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- Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Serie: NHB Modern Plays
- Sprache: Englisch
'You – miserable, mean, scribbler of a man. You're quoting from that play you put me in.' Abandoning theatre, living a life of squalid splendour, August Strindberg practises alchemy. In his hotel room, he attempts to make gold by finding the philosopher's stone, the secret of creation. As his grasp on reality weakens, his first two wives visit him to bring him to his senses. But their interventions spin out of control. For four years in fin-de-siècle Paris, Europe's most famous playwright vanished. Most people thought he had gone insane. When he reappeared, his new plays changed theatre forever. Howard Brenton's play The Blinding Light tells the astonishing story of August Strindberg's 'Inferno' period. It premiered at Jermyn Street Theatre, London, in 2017, directed by Tom Littler.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Howard Brenton
THE BLINDINGLIGHT
NICK HERN BOOKS
London
www.nickhernbooks.co.uk
Contents
Title Page
Original Production
The Self-Experimenter
Characters
The Blinding Light
About the Author
Copyright and Performing Rights Information
The Blinding Light was first performed at the Jermyn Street Theatre, London, on 6 September 2017, with the following cast:
LOLA
Laura Morgan
AUGUST
Jasper Britton
SIRI
Susannah Harker
FRIDA
Gala Gordon
Director
Tom Littler
Set Designer
Cherry Truluck for Lucky Bert
Costume Designer
Emily Stuart
Lighting Designer
William Reynolds
Composer and Sound Designer
Max Pappenheim
Associate Director
Stella Powell-Jones
The Self-Experimenter
I wrote The Blinding Light to try to understand the mental and spiritual crisis that August Strindberg suffered in February, 1896. Deeply disturbed, plagued by hallucinations, he holed up in various hotel rooms in Paris, most famously in the Hotel Orfila in the Rue d’Assas.
He’d had great success in Paris. A revival of Miss Julie in 1893 created a sensation and, in 1895, The Father had been rapturously received. But now he abandoned playwriting. He announced he was not a writer but a true ‘natural scientist’, an alchemist. His hands burnt by chemicals, he attempted to make gold.
He chronicled the experience in his novel Inferno. Like so much of his autobiographical writing, it is unreliable. Truth in Strindberg is, shall we say, a moveable reality – as he says in my play, ‘The bright memories are always true.’ But it is beyond doubt that he was in the midst of a psychotic episode, dedicated to alchemy and convinced supernatural forces were trying to stop his experiments. The Strindberg scholar Michael Robinson told me that, in the 1970s, researching in the Royal Library in Stockholm, he opened a notebook of Strindberg’s never looked at before – the huge archive was then not fully explored. Small strips of card, two inches long, fell out. At their ends they had a yellowy stain. They were for testing for gold.
But there is another way of looking at what some see as a total breakdown. He had taken the realism of plays like The Father, Creditors and Miss Julie, in its day an extreme and revolutionary theatre, as far as he could. He’d hit a wall. Strindberg wrote and lived off his instincts, his feelings, swinging between extremes; he’s been called one of the first modernists, but he was also one of the last romantics. Instinctively, despite the psychosis and the absinthe, he was trying to destroy then rebuild his view of the world. He was experimenting on himself.
And alchemy was an ideal guide. Like all mystic systems it is a process of steps towards perfection. First everything must be broken down in the stage of ‘putrefaction’. Only then can the ascent to the final stage begin, ‘coagulation’: the transformation of all that is base into incorruptible gold. But – and this greatly appealed to Strindberg – to achieve the chemical process the alchemist must, in parallel, break down his own very being to be able to ascend to a final state of realisation. Alchemy is a moral quest.
Bonkers? But it worked. After four years’ silence, Strindberg returned to the theatre with a series of fantastical plays such as A Dream Play, The Ghost Sonata and To Damascus. Were the alchemy and the playwriting actually part of the same project? Before and after the crisis in Paris he always wanted to make the theatre more real, at first by being true to the minutiae of everyday life – the famous cooking on stage in Miss Julie – then by trying to stage psychological states so vividly you think you are dreaming wide awake. By ‘realist’ or ‘expressionist’ means he wanted audiences to see the world in a new light.
Howard BrentonAugust 2017
Characters
AUGUST
LOLA, a hotel cleaner
SIRI, August’s first wife
FRIDA, August’s second wife
The play is set in February 1896 in the Hotel Orfila,Rue d’Assas, Paris
This ebook was created before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play as performed.
Scene One
February 1896. A squalid top-floor room in the Hotel Orfila, Rue d’Assas, Paris.
AUGUST, hands red.
LOLA, maid and cleaner at the Orfila. She has a mop and a bucket.
LOLA. I’m a cleaner, I clean, that’s what I do.
She makes a move, he blocks her.
I’ve got to do the bathroom, monsieur!
AUGUST. You’re not doing the bathroom!
LOLA. Don’t give me grief. I just got this job. It’s shitty work but I need it.
AUGUST. Why does the management suddenly want to clean in here? They never have before.
LOLA. That I can see. What’s the yellow stain?
AUGUST. A failed oxidisation.
LOLA. Sounds kind of kinky.
AUGUST. I – I’ve paid for these rooms. What I do in them is my inalienable right!
LOLA. Your what?
AUGUST. I know the creatures of the passing show, the wise who think me mad, would sneer. But this is my kingdom! This is where I will open the door to the hidden world!
LOLA. What door’s that?
AUGUST. It’s mystic.
LOLA. Misty?
AUGUST. Mystical! In the mind! In the head! In – another dimension! Leading to the future!
LOLA. I don’t want to open no door to the future, I want to open the door to your bathroom.
An exasperated gesture by AUGUST. LOLA reads it as aggressive.
You wanta hit me? Word of advice – don’t wanta hit me. I know how to deal with men who wanta hit me.
AUGUST. You are violating a reality you cannot perceive.
LOLA. Yeah. Right.
She opens the bathroom door, about to step in.
AUGUST. Hermes Trismegistus, come to my aid.
But LOLA recoils and slams the door shut, mop and bucket flung away. She retches.
LOLA. Fucking bloody Ada, what’s in the bath?
AUGUST. It’s not a bomb.
LOLA. That horrible stuff! And all them tubes!
AUGUST. I am not a terrorist! I am not making a bomb!
They are looking at each other. LOLA is breathless.
LOLA. I gotta tell the management.
She moves.
AUGUST. It’s gold.
She stops.
LOLA. What do you mean, gold?
AUGUST. I practise alchemy, a science, the true science.
LOLA. That in there’s not gold, it’s a – stinky sludge, and it’s – sort of black!
AUGUST. It’s a work-in-progress.
LOLA. The police have told the hotels – look out for oddballs. Cos of the bombings. And if you’re not an oddball I don’t know who is.
AUGUST. We’re all odd. We’re human.
LOLA. I think you’re dangerous.
AUGUST. Course I am, I’m a man.
She looks at him then laughs.
LOLA. What a what a stupid, pathetic, weedy thing to say.
AUGUST. Weedy?
LOLA. Are you a drunk?
AUGUST. Alcohol’s – an occupational hazard.
LOLA. Is it now. Well, being pissed in Paris is nothing special. Nah you’re not dangerous, you’re just a weedy drunk.
AUGUST. A stupid, pathetic, weedy drunk.
LOLA. You’ve got lovely blue eyes but I can see it in ’em.
AUGUST. See what?
LOLA. The pit of hell.
AUGUST. You’re very forthright.
LOLA. That’s just me.
AUGUST. I am dangerous, because if I make gold life will change for ever.
LOLA. Going to be rich, are you?
AUGUST. All of humanity will be rich.
LOLA. And how do you make that out?
AUGUST. Because the old science won’t work. We must re-pattern reality. Humanity will have to think of the world in a new way.
LOLA blows a raspberry.
What?
LOLA. You talk like one more dreggy, druggy poet.
AUGUST. I am not a poet, I’ve given all that up –
LOLA. I see loads of you in the cafés, sounding off about ‘the world’. When all you’re really after is a fuck.
AUGUST. Don’t be vulgar.
LOLA. Ooh, dear oh dear –
AUGUST. I hate vulgarity. It diminishes the soul.
LOLA. Poor you.
AUGUST. I’ve been branded vulgar! Branded by the unseen powers!
He points to his forehead.
That’s where they did it. To make me the man with the mark.
LOLA. Let me see.
She closes on him and looks at his forehead.
There’s nothing there. I do like the eyes, though.
He backs away sharply. She laughs.
So sensitive! Yeah, a poet if I ever saw one.
AUGUST. I’m a scientist! A true scientist, an alchemist.
A pause.
LOLA. So – how much?
AUGUST. How much for what?
LOLA. How much’ll you pay me? For not letting on about the mess all this science makes in your bathroom?
AUGUST. I am – a bit stretched.
LOLA. Are you now? Right, management, police –
AUGUST. I’ll give you some gold.
