. . .And since dreams are more often painful than happy, a tone of melancholy, and of compassion for all living things, runs through the swaying narrative. Sleep, supposedly a liberator, is often a torturer, but when torment is at its worst, an awakening reconciles the sufferer with reality. No matter how agonizing reality can be, at this moment, compared with a tormenting dream it is a pleasure.
August Strindberg frequently referred to A Dream Play as his "favorite" work, but he also referred to it as "the child of my greatest pain." Just as was the case with Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Strindberg's A Dream Play is not only among the artist's most important works, but was a work with dreamlike and surrealist elements that followed from a nervous breakdown. Is madness the price one pays to create great art? Sometimes it seems.
One thing is for certain, A Dream Play is certainly a revolutionary work, with Strindberg furthering his break away from realism and naturalism in much the same way that Federico Fellini (and Ingmar Bergman in his own way) would do in film, moving from neorealism ultimately to surrealism, blending the dreamworld with the waking world. Although To Damascus (a play that I've yet to read, and one that is considered by some to be Strindberg's true "masterpiece") preceded A Dream Play by two years (both starring Strindberg's third wife, Harriet Bosse, when initially produced in Sweden), it is interesting that Strindberg didn't consider its style an experimentation that he would just as soon abandon when working on his next play (as is the case with some of his decisions in Miss Julie), but would instead expand on these, taking some great leaps forward, giving A Dream Play a very contemporary and even postmodern feel.
Apparently when he first wrote To Damascus, Strindberg had sent a copy of that work to his contemporary Henrik Ibsen, whom Strindberg referred to as "the Master, from whom he learned much." Not having read that earlier work, but having read the author's note at the beginning of A Dream Play, in which he writes that in both plays he "has attempted to imitate the disconnected but seemingly logical form of a dream," I feel that in both cases Strindberg perhaps owes some debt to the early Ibsen's Peer Gynt, which like A Dream Play not only blends reality and illusion or fantasy, but has an impressively long cast of characters (unlike Strindberg's earlier plays and, likewise, unlike Ibsen's later plays). And like Peer Gynt it seems that A Dream Play, fascinating as it is, would present extraordinary technical difficulties, with rapidly changing scenes and images like castles that grow from the ground and later burn and then blossom.
The difficulties in staging such a play are highlighted by Ingmar Bergman in his illuminating autobiography, A Magic Lantern. He stated of his later difficulties in staging some of Strindberg's works (though less due to technical issues than personal problems for him and his cast, though he does discuss general production issues with A Dream Play as well) that it seemed as though Strindberg's ghost was standing in his way:
Strindberg has been showing displeasure with me in recent years. . . . [He goes on to give several examples]. That number of misfortunes is no coincidence. For some reason, Strindberg did not want me. The thought saddened me, for I love him.
For Bergman it seemed, the plays of Strindberg were his MacBeth, Shakespeare's supposedly cursed "Scottish play."
Because of the difficulties that the play presents to theatre directors this would be a very fascinating play to see staged, and it would be even more interesting to compare different productions of it to see how different directors and theatre companies transcend the technical obstacles which the play presents.
In terms of content, interestingly, while there is no evidence suggesting that Strindberg read Sigmund Freud (just as there is no evidence that Proust read Freud, despite surprising similarities), his writing on dreams (which he explores through art) is very similar to that of Freud. Perhaps cosmically or historically there is something to this and many artists and thinkers were making the same realizations at the same time for whatever reason, drawing from the same universal pool of knowledge (perhaps someone has written on this; if so it would be an interesting read, I'm sure, and if not here's an idea for exploration -- provided one has the time to commit the endless hours of research time to this task).
A Dream Play is seen by some as a forerunner to Expressionism and Surrealism and, as in a dream, scenes shift rapidly and with little logical reason, characters come and go and different symbols emerge here and there (a few very sexual), some more obvious than others, just as in Freud's theories on dreams.
As with many a Strindberg play, although this one is in a different style from his early works, there is still an autobiographical strand in this work. Strindberg had just gone through a third divorce, this time with Harriet Bosse, who played the lead in the original production of this work, and had (as with his other relationships) turned the gritty side of them into artistic material. And, also as with Strindberg's other works, this play operates in a mythical world and draws on certain familiar motifs from fairy tales, though unlike his earlier works (because of its dreamlike qualities) it is harder to pin down in a specific socio-historical period.
There was so much to this short play -- too much to elaborate on here (though if I pick this play up again I'd like to expand on the many thematic points that I left out of this review) -- and it was constantly drawing my mind this way and that to other works that I've read, some of which Strindberg may or may not have been intentionally alluding to (the stories of Balzac, the poetry of William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe, the plays of Ibsen, the work of Freud and Marx) and to so many works that seemed to owe a great deal to this play (like Beckett's Waiting for Godot and, of course, the films of Bergman and Fellini).
I suppose that insomuch as the themes are so similar to other Strindberg plays, while the structure, form and setting are so different, that it is probably more justifiable that I focus in this review on the latter points. In my review of Strindberg's The Dance of Death, after all, I note that (like many artists) his work dealt with recurring themes (which are identified in that review). This play took many of those same familiar themes and did something new and exhilarating with them, making it instantly my favorite of the four Strindberg plays that I've read to date.