Edgar and Alice, the married couple bound together by hate, love and guilt, staging their war before the necessary witness Kurt are a classic threesome in theatre, inspiring many successors. Martha and George and their young night guests are but one flagrant example. We’re planning a staging of part one of this play at my theatre, as a part of the hundred year anniversary of Strindberg’s death, and I needed to reread it. I took the opportunity to read the much more seldom staged second part, while I had the first part fresh.

Like always, Strindberg writes a rather heavyhanded, almost crude, dialogue. His strength is in the passion and the misogyny, rather than in structure or finesse. This theme, being a vampire on someone else’s misery suits him fine. At times though, there are way too many exclamation points and pathetic outbursts for me, even taking the heightened style of the play into account.

The volume I read, part of an annotated collected works, also has a comment section at the end. It’s the kind you need to be a fanatic or the writer’s mother to enjoy, full of endless accounts of early mentions of minor characters in Strindberg’s occult diary or how many minutes were cut in the Köln production 1905. ( )