Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; the Outlaw; the Stronger
Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; the Outlaw; the Stronger
Translated by Edith Oland
August Strindberg detonated the 19th-century stage. These four plays radiate the white heat of a playwright who believed theater should wound, not comfort. In "The Father," a captain confronts his own unraveling sanity while his wife Laura systematically dismantles his grip on reality and paternity. "Countess Julie" traps an aristocratic woman and her servant in a single night of dangerous flirtation that exposes class, gender, and sexual power lines like exposed nerves. "The Outlaw" and "The Stronger" extend this brutal arithmetic of relationships, where every intimacy becomes a battlefield. Strindberg wrote these works in the 1880s, during his famous "Inferno Period" of psychological crisis, and the darkness of that era infuses every scene. These are not plays about people talking. They are about people attacking, manipulating, and destroying each other with words. For readers who want drama that feels like a fist to the chest.
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“Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.””
— August Strindberg
“Ştiţi cum se văd cei înstăriţi priviţi de jos? Nu, nu ştiţi! Ca ulii şi ca şoimii, a căror spate nu-l zărim decât rareori, fiindcă ei zboară aproape tot timpul acolo sus!””
— August Strindberg
“He roto con la tradición de presentar a los personajes como catequistas que con preguntas estúpidas provocan la réplica brillante. [...] Para ello he hecho que las mentes trabajen de un modo irregular, tal y como ocurre en la realidad, donde en una conversación nunca se agota el tema, donde un cerebro trabaja como una rueda dentada en la que el otro se engrana a la buena de Dios. Por eso el diálogo anda sin rumbo. He proveído en las primeras escenas de abundante material que en el desarrollo se elabora, se trabaja, se repite, se amplía lo mismo que el tema de una composición musical.””
— August Strindberg
