| Strindberg Knew My Father by Mark Jenkins |
| First presented in 1992 by Out of Wales Theatre Company |
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synopsis: (The full text of the play is to be found in ‘Best of the Fest’, Editor, Phil Setren, published by Aurora-Metro, 1998, ISBN 0-9515877-8-1) The play is a two-act comedy for a cast of five - three women and two men – with strong visual elements in scenes depicting levitation, alchemy and mesmerism. It is, in effect, a deconstruction of Strindberg’s ‘Miss Julie’. After the publication of ‘A Madman’s Defence’, Swedish dramatist August Strindberg spent the period from April to September, 1888, with his family on an extended holiday in a run down castle in Skvolyst-at-Lyngby in Denmark. This is the setting for the drama – six short months in a Gothic castle, where Strindberg’s marriage to the long-suffering Baroness Siri Von Essen (an accomplished professional actress), finally breaks up as he writes one of the great defining masterpieces of modern theatre – ‘Miss Julie’. All the events and persons depicted in this (at times) farcical nightmare are historically verified and accurate, however outlandish they may appear. The decaying castle, over-run by dogs, cats, peacocks, ducks and rabbits, is owned by the eccentric culture-vulture, Countess ‘Anna’ Frankenau but managed by her gypsy half-brother, the envious, scheming bailiff, Ludwig Hansen, determined to inherit the estate denied him because of his illegitimacy. Ludwig is skilled in the art of Mesmerism and levitation. He has a fifteen-year- old gypsy half-sister, Martha, whose prospects he seeks to advance by hypnotising her into having an affair with the increasingly deranged Strindberg, who is exhibiting the early symptoms of his later paranoid schizophrenia. Strindberg does not know of the blood relationships between Anna, Ludwig and Martha but he begins writing Miss Julie, using the trio as his writing models in between increasingly fraught confrontations with his wife, Siri, whom he falsely accuses of making lesbian advances to Anna and Martha. Meanwhile the sex-starved Strindberg himself embarks on an affair with the young serving girl, egged on by Ludwig, who promptly charges him with rape of a minor. Ludwig also manages to break into the permanently locked writing desk in which the manuscript of Miss Julie is hidden and sets about instituting proceedings for libel for insinuating that he, Ludwig, and the Countess (Anna) are having an affair. Anna manages to retain aristocratic aloofness from all this nonsense and finds it both amusing and bewildering. She ‘hasn’t had so much fun in years!’. She befriends Siri and tries to counsel her in how to save the marriage. She also maintains good relations with Strindberg throughout, endlessly fascinated by his experiments in alchemy and his obsession with Nietszche. But Strindberg, even in his delicate mental state, manages to turn the tables on his tormentors. He gets Ludwig arraigned on a burglary rap, charges him with importuning and escapes from the castle (and his marriage) with his now completed manuscript, pursued by eight Great Danes, with Ludwig firing buckshot from the French windows! This is a gothic piece, in which all the characters are depicted as they might have been seen through the eyes of a writer slowly losing touch with reality, whilst capturing some of the comic madness of the human condition. |
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