NORDIC , NOIR, NEUROTIC
In a hotel room, sea uneasy beyond and faint wind howling, dishevelled Adolf with his crutch listens to his smooth, confident new friend Gustaf. He shows him the tiny naked sculpture he has made of his absent wife Tekla, the woman he nurtured and encouraged after the brutality of her first husband. He thanks amiable Gustav for encouraging him to turn from his own decline as a painter to the new age of three-dimentional sculpture (it’s 1880). Gustaf saw Tekla on the ferry, chatting to young men and laughing that her husband thought her too old to flirt.
It is not a benign conversation. Four centuries after Iago, and nearly half a century before Freud ushered in the age of controlling therapists with a line in sexual excavation, this is August Strindberg (adapted by Howard Brenton). demonstrating how to mess with another man’s head. Especially if he’s an underemployed older husband with a fashionably gloomy Swedish scepticism about God. It’s dazzling talk, with Charles Dance as Gustaf in full control and Nicholas Farrell superbly confused as Adolf, gradually persuaded that he is owed credit as mentor for all his wife’s success as a writer. Easy enough, since he’s envious of her success as well as jealous .
Bad Gustaf also persuades him that his neurotic, lonely unwellness is due to “sexual excess” caused as so often by “women’s vicious appetites” and that it will give him epilepsy unless he gives it up. Remarried widows, he explains, are always voracious that way, which is why they burn them in India. Adolf obediently develops some of the symptoms, so that when Gustaf nips next door and his cheerful wife (Geraldine James, very glamorous) breezes in from her work meetings he immediately starts on her. Echoes all the Gustaf-stuff about how much she owes him for his support, and how the effort has sucked him dry.
“Are you saying you write my books.?” she asks with sudden flat lucidity, but he chunters on. Then, affectionately motherly, she sends him out for some fresh air. Whereon, of course, Gustaf reappears and – no spoilers, even in such famous Strindbergiana- you’ll never guess who he turns out to be….
Like Ibsen, his contemporary on the Nordic peninsula, Strindberg is an acknowledged vital influence on the development of emotionally intense 20c naturalistic drama, even if his characters are woefully hard to warm to (Tennessee Williams, a follower, can make your heart bleed even for the worst behaved characters, but Strindberg’s just make your brain ache and despair rise.).
But in this production – Tom Littler directing – Brenton keeps it short and crisp at 85 minutes, and Dance and Farrell are flawless, sometimes mercifully funny. A 21c audience is, after all, bound to get some laughs at lines like “a wife is the husband’s child” and at the concept that women are just incomplete males. Geraldine James also mercifully gives Tekla some proper relatable humanity: confident ,outgoing and affectionate but prone (a fatal female trait) to receive unreasonable reproaches by getting crestfallen, accepting guilt and wanting to make things better. These are three bravura performances, and it’s a fascinating short evening for students of the changes in drama and social ideas as the 20th century struggled to dawn. But you do need a stiff drink when you get out.
orangetreetheatre.co.uk to 11 October
Rating. 3.
theatreCat 