August Strindberg

This exciting anthology of one-act plays includes classics such as Anton Chekhov's "The Boor" and John Millington Synge's "Riders to the Sea" as well as lesser-known gems such as Alice Gerstenberg's "Fourteen" and Percival Wilde's "The Sequel." Other plays in the collection include August Strindberg's "The Stronger," Moliere's "The Pretentious Young Ladies," Neith Boyce's "Enemies," Horace Holley's "The Genius," Susan Glaspell's "Trifles," and Ferenc Molnar's "A Matter of Husbands." Best of all, every play in this anthology is in the public domain and may, therefore, be performed without paying royalties, making this a great resource for theatres or schools with limited budgets.

Denne utviklingsromanen tar for seg et år i den unge dikteren Arvid Falks liv. Falk beveger seg i en serie tablåer som gir leseren et historisk bilde av Sverige omkring 1870. Som tidsbilde gir romanen interiører fra hjem og kro, forlag og parlament, teater- og bohemmiljø. Romanen er en satire over det borgerlige samfunn.

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.

As all the great dramatists since the Greek tragedians have known, class and gender roles continue to remain the two fundamental determinants of the social fabric of any culture--even one, like our own, in which the boundaries of those identities have become fluid, situational and transitory. David French's adaptation of August Strindberg's disturbing and enduring drama of the transgressive affair between the daughter of a count and the count's man-servant has an eerie feel of the contemporary about it. In this adaptation of Miss Julie, French has sharpened the psychodramas of the original--scenes of conflict, desire, anger, jealousy, coercion, manipulation, exploitation, arrogance, dominance, submission and deceit--and backgrounded the historical elements of the play which have made it a favourite "period-piece" of the repertory theatre circuit. His revisioning of Miss Julie foregrounds the ruptures of identity and faith that ambition and desire eternally work in their rending of social norms, strictures and conventions, and he has re-enacted them in a contemporary idiom and vernacular that virtually cries out for the casting-call of a Paris Hilton to play the lead role.As with his adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull, David French, one of Canada's best-loved playwrights, has here once again paid homage to one of the enduring masters who have brought to the stage the most elemental and universal dramas of the human condition.

August Strindberg's gripping psychological drama about the battle of the sexes, in a version by Mike Poulton. Strindberg's play The Father is about a marriage wrecked by the parents' need to claim exclusive rights to their daughter's love, and to determine her future. By turns comic and deeply tragic, it shows an affable, scholarly father fall victim to a once loving wife who will stop at nothing to do what she thinks is right for her child. The only possible outcome is a grim, yet thrilling fight to the death in circumstances of almost unbearable tension. Written in 1887, The Father was first staged in Berlin in 1890. This English version by Mike Poulton was first staged at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, in 2006.

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.

Strindbergs författarskap ger otaliga exempel på hans passionerade kvinnodyrkan. Den här volymen innehåller en rad av hans mest mest briljanta noveller och andra strålande uttrycksfulla texter från hans mästarhand, t ex utdrag ur hans allra vackraste kärleksbrev till Siri von Essen och Harriet Bosse.

In Strindberg's A Dream Play, written in 1901, characters merge into each other, locations change in an instant and a locked door becomes an obsessively recurrent image. As Strindberg himself 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." Caryl Churchill's spare and resonant new version was first staged at the National Theatre, London, in a production by Katie Mitchell, where A Dream Play was called "fresh, new and magical" (Telegraph). Caryl Churchill has written for the stage, television and radio. A renowned and prolific playwright, her plays include Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Bliss, Love and Information, Mad Forest and A Number. In 2002, she received the Obie Lifetime Achievement Award and 2010, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a novelist and playwright from Stockholm, Sweden. His plays include Miss Julie, The Father, To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Pelican. In 1912 Strindberg's birthday was marked by a torchlight procession through Stockholm, where his radical journalism had earned him the title of 'people's writer.'