Abstract
No dramatist has ever given more consideration to the visual dimension of his plays than Strindberg. His introduction of Arnold Böcklin’s painting, The Isle of the Dead, at the end of the late play The Ghost Sonata, to impose a mood of unearthly tranquillity and ultimate solitude, was the climax of a long practice of using the scene, the stage picture, expressively. He was well equipped to do so, having been a practising painter. His pictures are well represented in Scandinavian public collections, but have only been seen outside Scandinavia in an exhibition of ‘Sources of the Twentieth Century’ at the Paris Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1960–61, and in a small travelling exhibition which visited the British Museum in 1962.
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Notes and References
In the Clinic is reproduced in Göran Söderström, Strindberg och bildkonsten (Strindberg and pictorial art) (Stockholm: Forum, 1972) and the Munch portrait in SM, facing p. 148.
Notes on symbolic meanings Strindberg gave to his paintings are given in H. G. Carlson, Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 8–9.
Per Hemmingsson, August Strindberg som fotograf (August Strindberg as photographer) (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1963) deals most fully with this topic.
See especially Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman (New York: Twayne, 1968).
Fem År med Strindberg (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1935), Strindberg och Teater (Stockholm: Dahlberg, 1918). Emil Schering’s German translation of these notes is drawn on in August Strindberg, Théâtre cruel et théâtre mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 143–9. Reminiscences by actors from the Intimate Theatre, together with readings (in which Harriet Bosse is included), were recorded and are available under the label, ‘Röster fran Strindbergs teater’ (ALB’s dokumentätserie Svenska roster 3, 1968, re-issued 1981).
On Strindberg’s knowledge of contemporary theatrical innovations and histories of the theatre, see G. M. Bergman, ‘Strindberg and the Intima Teatern’ (sic), Theatre Research IX (1976), pp. 14–47, which includes some illustrations from Fem År med Strindberg.
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© 1985 Margery Morgan
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Morgan, M. (1985). Dramatist as Director. In: August Strindberg. Macmillan Modern Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17979-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17979-4_5
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