Over one century ago Strindberg bequeathed to us the monument of his work. Well into the new millennium, we want to go beyond mere literary criticism to explore the artist’s driving force: to think about and create a theatre necessary for the society of his time. To speak to the contemporaries from the contemporary. Or, put another way, to find languages, forms and contents to be questioned and confronted with the turn-of-the-century social and individual conflicts. And this is why Strindberg’s work explores and transgresses the aesthetic and ideological limits of his period. His struggle provides a reason for reflecting on the theatre that today seeks to be untimely (contemporary).
On the one hand, we are interested in setting out Strindberg’s work as a stimulus and inexhaustible site of dramaturgic thoughts and procedures.
On the other, we want to continue assessing Strindberg’s dramatic production as fertile ground for rewriting. We want to examine how he is currently read, interpreted, adapted and performed. How different creators approach him ─ or have approached him ─ as material of theoretical and creative reference in their overarching need for renewal.
Strindberg: Stimulus for and Site of Artistic Thoughts and Procedures
Strindberg forcefully challenges the absolute dramatic form. He needs to create drivers of theatricality based on intersubjectivity and political thought. This is why he focuses on the inner universe of the characters and their life journey. In most of his production, individuals ─ often in an explicitly self-referential play ─ seek a way to release the complexity of their intimate universe. In this vein, and more or less consciously, the playwright outlines the paths of what today we call “decomposition of the contemporary subject” or “dissolution of the character”.
Strindberg, therefore, opens the way. He explores in the limits, the fringes, the border: both in terms of the use of language or the established forms of drama and literature in general and in the approach to different themes. And also in understanding the playwright’s role in society or in dealing with scientific or technological issues. In this way, Strindberg manages to occupy the centre of the literary and cultural field of the period (which he helps build together with others responsible for the explosion of modernity in the north, such as Ibsen and Brandes).
Since Strindberg’s time, theatre has been continually rethought. The new approaches have been committed to decomposing and recomposing the space, the time or the characters; to playing down the margins that separate truth from fiction; to activating a real patchwork of genders, styles and materials… The essence of what is dramatic is dissolved. Today, within a single play it is possible to combine (rapsodically, as Jean-Pierre Sarrazac would say) narrative objectivation processes (epic model), the journey inward ─ access to the intimate ─ (lyrical model) and the dialogical exchange (dramatic model). However, what if today this untimely race has begun to show signs of fatigue? What if the old finds had began to become new conventions? What if the momentum towards contemporaneity has been disconnected from the thrust that originated it? What if the contemporary creator and prescriber ─ immersed in multiple battles ─ has forgotten to whom and of what he speaks?
Strindberg’s Rewritings
In terms of Strindberg’s dramatic production, we are particularly (although not exclusively) interested in plays such as The Road to Damascus, The Ghost Sonata and A Dream Play. The aim is to recover the audacity of texts that broke with the expectations and conventions of his time; to accept the formal and discursive challenge posed by these pieces as an invitation to rethink what doing contemporary theatre means.
We are also interested in examining how Strindberg is read, interpreted, adapted and staged at present. Mainly ─ but not exclusively ─ by those creators who adopt the Strindbergian texts as a score or as raw material to conceive their productions.