August Strindberg is one of the founders of the modern theater. George Bernard Shaw considered him "the only genuinely Shakespearian modern dramatist," Sean O'Casey called him "the greatest of them all." And to Eugene O'Neill he was "the greatest interpreter in the theater of the characteristic spiritual conflicts of our lives today." Twelve Major Plays includes the most famous and most characteristic Strindberg plays.This selection is particularly interesting in its depiction of the great range of Strindberg's moods and styles, from naturalism to expressionism, from ironic comedy to bitter tragedy. It displays his great gift for symbolic, mystical verse as well as his command of dramatic prose. In issues of sex and gender, Strindberg anticipated the modern temperament in society and drama alike.These translations gave American readers their first opportunity to know the true genius of Strindberg. Most previous versions in English had been based on existing German translations. Elizabeth Sprigge's unique achievement was to render the original Swedish texts into English that is at once fluent and accurate and that captures the full vigor and impact of the original plays.

August Strindberg is one of the founders of the modern theater. George Bernard Shaw considered him "the only genuinely Shakespearian modern dramatist," Sean O'Casey called him "the greatest of them all." And to Eugene O'Neill he was "the greatest interpreter in the theater of the characteristic spiritual conflicts of our lives today." "Twelve Major Plays" includes the most famous and most characteristic Strindberg plays.

This selection is particularly interesting in its depiction of the great range of Strindberg's moods and styles, from naturalism to expressionism, from ironic comedy to bitter tragedy. It displays his great gift for symbolic, mystical verse as well as his command of dramatic prose. In issues of sex and gender, Strindberg anticipated the modern temperament in society and drama alike.

These translations gave American readers their first opportunity to know the true genius of Strindberg. Most previous versions in English had been based on existing German translations. Elizabeth Sprigge's unique achievement was to render the original Swedish texts into English that is at once fluent and accurate and that captures the full vigor and impact of the original plays.

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Bored with her sheltered existence, Miss Julie attempts to seduce the footman, but gets far more than she bargained for... August Strindberg's classic naturalistic play Miss Julie was written in 1888, and first performed at Strindberg's experimental theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1889, despite being banned by the censor. This English version, translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish, is published in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series. The volume also includes Strindberg's Preface.

This is a fully edited translation of a series of essays by the great Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. The essays, edited and translated by Michael Robinson, have been selected for the light they shed, both directly and indirectly, on Strindberg's contribution to the European theatre, firstly in such masterpieces of psychological realism as The Father and Miss Julie, and subsequently in those works, including A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, with which he largely established a basis for theatrical modernism. Together with the accompanying notes and commentary, these essays on psychology, history, painting, natural history and alchemy as well as the theatre, help to clarify the multifaceted nature of Strindberg's project. Idiosyncratic and lively, they offer crucial insights into the intellectual history of the late nineteenth century, while their personal nature draws the reader into an intimate relationship with the writer and his wide range of interests.

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.' This version of A Dream Play, from a literal translation by Charlotte Barslund, is by leading playwright Caryl Churchill. It was first performed in the Cottesloe auditorium of the National Theatre, London, in February 2005, in a production directed by Katie Mitchell, with additional material by Katie Mitchell and the company. Also included is an introduction by Caryl Churchill.

This is a fully edited translation of a series of essays by the great Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. The essays, edited and translated by Michael Robinson, have been selected for the light they shed, both directly and indirectly, on Strindberg's contribution to the European theatre, firstly in such masterpieces of psychological realism as The Father and Miss Julie, and subsequently in those works, including A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, with which he largely established a basis for theatrical modernism. Together with the accompanying notes and commentary, these essays on psychology, history, painting, natural history and alchemy as well as the theatre, help to clarify the multifaceted nature of Strindberg's project. Idiosyncratic and lively, they offer crucial insights into the intellectual history of the late nineteenth century, while their personal nature draws the reader into an intimate relationship with the writer and his wide range of interests.

The three plays in this volume focus on the tumultuous relationships between men and women, whether they are father and daughter, brother and sister or lovers. "Miss Julie" is a ruthlessly realistic depiction of an upper class woman's seduction of a servant, emphasizing the differences and the antagonism between them. In "The Father", a man is brought to madness and driven out of his home by the suspicion that his daughter is not his own child, while "Easter" centres on a family in need of redemption for its sins and suffering, finding forgiveness at a season of rebirth. Strindberg's acute psychological analysis and his dramatization of naked emotion within a naturalistic domestic setting make him one of the great innovators of the modern theatre.

In the oppressive heat of Midsummer's Eve, Julie, daughter of the lord, is drawn into a dangerous tryst with her father's butler. As the night wears on, the couple, from opposite ends of the social spectrum, dance, flirt and fight towards an explosive conclusion that will shake the existing order to its core. Zinnie Harris's new version of Strindberg's nineteenth-century masterpiece, Miss Julie, relocates the play to central Scotland between the wars. The play premiered at Platform, Easterhouse, in a National Theatre of Scotland Ensemble production in September 2006.

August Strindberg (1849-1912) is best known outside Sweden as a dramatist, but he was also a prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays, journalism and poetry - as well as a notable artist and photographer. Although he spent many years abroad, Strindberg was born, grew up and died in Stockholm and The Red Room is perhaps the quintessential Stockholm novel. A satire of the rapidly changing society of the 1870s, it was Strindberg's first novel and marked his literary breakthrough: it offers, he said, 'a panorama of a society I don't love and which has never loved me'. It contains some of the great set-piece scenes in Swedish literature, a gallery of unforgettable caricatures in the spirit of Dickens, humour, pathos and satirical targets as apt now as they were then. The Red Room is often called Sweden's first modern novel, and it remains modern almost a century and a half later.

Miss Julie (1888), written in a fortnight, was regarded by Strindberg as his masterpiece, 'the first naturalistic tragedy of the Swedish drama'. Shocking in subject-matter, revolutionary in technique, it was fiercely attacked on publication for immorality. On Midsummer Eve, Miss Julie, the daughter of a count, sleeps with her father's valet, Jean. The subsequent conflict between sexual passion and social position, which leads to her suicide, is presented with startling modernity. The play's premiere at Strindberg's experimental theatre in Denmark in 1889 was banned by the censor and its first public production three years later in Berlin aroused such protests that it was withdrawn after one performance. Miss Julie has since become one of Strindberg's most popular and frequently performed plays. Commentary and notes by David Thomas and Jo Taylor.

A new adaptation of Strindberg's thrilling psychological drama, newly politically-charged in Amy Ng's adaptation. It's Chinese New Year in 1940s Hong Kong. Julie is the daughter of the island's British Governor. With her father away for the weekend, Julie comes downstairs to join the servants as they party, initiating a sexually-charged power game with her father's butler. What starts as a game descends into a fight for survival as sex, power, money and race collide on a hot night in the Pearl River Delta. This edition was published to coincide with the premiere at Storyhouse, Chester, in February 2020.

One of the greatest classics of modern theater-the fateful drama of a willful young aristocrat's seduction of her father's valet during a Midsummer's Eve celebration. Inspired by the new ideas of naturalism and psychology that swept Europe in the late 19th century, the play is reprinted here from an authoritative edition complete with Strindberg's critical preface, considered by many one of the most important manifestos in theater history.

Play something kitty-cat-ish . . . sweet. Imagine I've died and you're galloping through fields. As their thirtieth wedding anniversary approaches, Alice and Edgar are locked in a bitter struggle. They've driven away their children and their friends. Their relationship is sustained by taunts and recriminations. When a newcomer breaks into the midst of the fray, their insular lives threaten to spin out of control. We're all just bodies and when we're dead we're worm food, but as long as your body keep going, flailing or thrashing about, we are duty bound to fight, to scratch and kick, until you're fucked. That's my philosophy. Laced with biting humour, The Dance of Death is August Strindberg's landmark drama about a marriage pushed to its limits, adapted in a thrilling new version by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. The Dance of Death opened at the Bath Theatre Royal's Ustinov Theatre in May 2022 before going on UK tour in an Arcola Theatre, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Royal & Derngate, Northampton, Oxford Playhouse and Theatre Royal Bath Productions co-production.

Frank McGuinness presents scintillating new versions of two of August Strindberg's plays.

Miss Julie is Strindberg's examination of power, sex, and class, set on a midsummer's eve in a nobleman's house and focusing on the shifting relationship between Miss Julie, the daughter of the house, and Jean, her father's manservant.

The Stronger is a short play that explores the complex range of emotions felt by Madame X when she encounters Mademoiselle Y, her husband's former mistress, at a fashionable café. Calling Mademoiselle Y worn out and evil, Madame X says that the triumph of her marriage proves she is the stronger of the two—even though these words ring hollow, as she attempts to deceive only herself.

August Strindberg's classic portrayals of secrets and lies, seduction and power – both written in the summer of 1888 – in brilliant new versions by Howard Brenton. Miss Julie begins as a flirtatious game between the daughter of a wealthy landowner and her father's manservant, and gradually descends, over the course of a long and sultry Midsummer's Eve, into a savage fight for survival. In Creditors, young artist Adolf is deeply in love with his new wife Tekla – but a chance meeting with a suave stranger shakes his devotion to the core. Passionate, dangerously funny, and enduringly perceptive, Strindberg considered this wickedly enjoyable black comedy his masterpiece. Both plays premiered in co-productions between Jermyn Street Theatre, London, and Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, directed by Jermyn Street's Artistic Director Tom Littler.

"The Roofing Ceremony" is a powerful, ultimately hopeful short novel that will revise the narrow view of August Strindberg as merely a misogynist and the gloomiest of Scandinavian writers. This novel has an inwardness, irreducibly and complexly human, that looks back to Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and forward to Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.
Published in Sweden in 1906 and never before translated into English, "The Roofing Ceremony" (Taklagsol) anticipates in its turbulent intensity the chamber plays Strindberg was soon to write. It is about a dying man, once an explorer but now a museum curator, who reviews his tumultuous life aloud as he drifts in and out of a morphine-induced sleep. Sometimes fragmentary, sometimes episodic, this impressionistic monologue builds up a vivid and nuanced portrait of the curator and his estranged wife, chronicling passionately but also humorously the descent of their marriage from island idyll into bitter comedy into tragic estrangement. Strindberg anticipated in this work the modern psychological novel and the technique of stream-of-consciousness.

A curious, brief narrative Strindberg meant to incorporate into "The Roofing Ceremony" but never did is also included in this book, as well as a story called "The Silver Lake" written in 1898, which also appears in English for the first time. A museum curator, summering on a Baltic island, seeks out a forbidden lake and shares its enchantment with his wife and children. But his marriage is doomed, and when he returns to the lake alone, its mystery turns sinister.

Includes The Chamber Plays (The Storm, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, The Pelican, The Black Glove) and The Great Highway August Strindberg, the great Swedish dramatist and author, had a profound influence on European drama. His career was particularly marked by a desire to experiment with and redefine theatre. With roots in psychological naturalism, he was nevertheless fascinated by symbols, dreams and fantasies.His later plays anticipated and paved the way for surrealistic, expressionistic and absurdist theatre.This, the second volume of the plays of Strindberg publishedby Oberon Books, contains the Chamber Plays (The Storm, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, The Pelican, The Black Glove) - some of the most characteristic and original of Strindberg's works - as well as Strindberg's last great play, written shortly before his death. This is The Great Highway, one of the expressionist masterpiecesof modern drama. A man walks the Alps encountering feuding millers, a hermit, a murderer, a Japanese man resolved to burn himself to death to cleanse him of his existence, and a little girl waiting for her father to return. In the end he seeks to justify his life to an unknown woman whilst coughing blood into his handkerchief. The Tempter himself arrives with an offer from the Grand Duke...Gregory Motton's translations combine an unprecedented faithfulness to Strindberg's original texts with the natural fluency of one of our most linguistically able contemporary playwrights.

This second volume of the great Swedish writer August Strindberg's plays begins with To Damascus I (1898), the first of a trilogy. It mirrors his own departure from the naturalism he had explored in several of his earlier works, as he set forth on a spiritual odyssey. Crimes and Crimes (1899), from the beginning of his symbolist mode, is a lighter take on the themes in To Damascus I. The first of a two-part play, Dance of Death I (1900) depicts a dysfunctional marriage. A Dream Play (1901), which is one of Strindberg's most influential, shows reality converted into a dream; many critics consider it his greatest play. In 1907, Strindberg founded the Intimate Theater in Stockholm; The Ghost Sonata (1907) and The Pelican (1907), which were written for its opening, are two examples of a chamber play, a genre that Strindberg helped to originate.