August Strindberg

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 complete with Strindberg's critical preface.

¿Köra och Vända, så att man vidsamtalets slut talar mot sig sjelf.¿Strindbergs väldiga mängder efterlämnade manuskript, utkast och anteckningar brukar kallas ¿Gröna säcken¿ efter den kappsäck i vilken Strindberg under resor och förflyttningar förvarade materialet. Här finns förarbeten till den utgivna lyriken, prosan och dramatiken, här finns planerna till aldrig genomförda verk och fragment av skilda slag. Och här finns dokumenten från Strindbergs experiment och studier inom kemi, astronomi, biologi, optik, alkemi med mera. Ulf Olsson och Magnus Florin har tillbringat en tid i Strindbergs-rummet på Kungliga Biblioteket trettio meter under jord och ställt samman ett personligt urval som blir den hittills främsta redovisningen av denna märkliga manuskriptsamling. Här talar Strindberg på nytt med en både välbekant och främmande röst. Bokens omslag återger prov på Strindbergs så kallade celestografier ¿ natthimlen fäst direkt på den fotografiska plåten.

"The Father is probably Strindberg's best-known play, described as 'great realism' it focuses on the struggles between natural forces. The Father was a turning point for Strindberg, as he subsequently moved to write in a style he described as "artistic-psychological writing". Adapted in this edition by Richard Nelson, a leading playwright and adapter in America, this version was first perfomed at the Roundabout Theatre, New York. " '

This is the first 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.

The mortal conflict of the sexes, traced here by Strindberg in the clash between an aristocratic young woman and her valet. Ms. Stockenstrom's new translation retains the rhythm and emotional feel of the original while making the prose more playable for today's audiences.

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.

By far Strindberg's most aggressive work, The Father is a feverish nightmare of the struggle he saw between defiant masculinity and the "treacherous weakness" of woman. Mr. Brustein's adaptation takes account of modern feminist sensibilities without diminishing the play's relentless power and furious conclusion.

Strindberg's most important and most frequently performed plays - "The Father", "Miss Julie", "A Dream Play", "The Dance of Death", and "The Ghost Sonata" - are gathered together here in translations praised for their fluency and their elegance.

This volume contains three of Strindberg's most famous plays, spanning twenty years of prodigious creativity and recurrent personal crises: The Father, which displays Strindberg's suspicion of women at its most implacable, 'powerful and profound' (Guy de Maupassant); Miss Julie (1888), which he called his masterpiece, and in which he presents with startling modernity the conflict between sexual passion and social position; and The Ghost Sonata (1907), written in physical pain and spiritual torment, which is a phantasmagoric dream play, 'a direct source for the Theatre of the Absurd' (Martin Esslin)."Michael Meyer is the translator most actors turn to when seeking a definitive text" (Sunday Times)

During the past two decades, The Dance of Death, Strindberg’s long and taxing family drama, has come to be considered his masterpiece. Produced by major companies in New York and London, filmed once with Erich von Stroheim and then with Sir Laurence Olivier in the lead, adapted by Friedrich Dürrenmatt as Play Strindberg, and a direct influence on Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Dance of Death has established itself as one of the key works of the modern theater.

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.