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August Strindberg A Dream Play
"child of my greatest pain"
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On April 17
1907 'A Dream Play' was performed for the first time. A note in his diary on
the same day shows how he felt about the play: he calls it "my most beloved
play, the child of my greatest pain". A Dream Play was written in the autumn
of 1901, when Strindberg had recently married Harried Bosse. But the dream
of marital happiness is momentarily crushed when Harriet leaves home
"forever". Strindberg suffers alone for forty days, reaching the conclusion
that life is an illusion that never fulfils our dreams. At the end of the
year the play was finished.
A Dream Play was maybe the first drama to employ a dream-like reality as a
genre-in-itself. Traditionally plays have incorporated scenes illustrating
dreams or nightmares, but none have based an entire play around them. By
doing this, Strindberg abandoned conventional perceptions of time and space.
He had reduced his original theme, of the man waiting vainly at the theatre
for his fiancee who never comes, to a sub plot; his chief character now was
Indra's Daughter, the child of a god who is sent by her father to live among
mortals. She meets and marries a poor man's lawyer, who spends his life
vainly trying to right the wrongs of humanity; so she endures the agonies of
human existence until, at last, she puts off mortal flesh and returns to her
father.
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The song of the winds
Earth is not clean
life is not good
men are not evil
nor are they good
they live as they can
a day at a time
The sons of dust
in dust must wander
Born of dust
To dust they return
they were given feet to plod
Not wings.
Is the fault theirs
or yours?
From A Dream Play
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In a short foreword to A Dream Play, August Strindberg
explained his intention with the play:
"In this dream play, the author has, as in his
former dream play, To Damascus, attempted to imitate the inconsequent yet
transparently logical shape of a dream. Everything can happen, everything is
possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant
basis of reality , the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of
memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.
The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse,
assemble.But one consciousness rules over them all, that of the dreamer; for
him there are no secrets, no scruples, no laws. He neither acquits nor
condemns, but merely relates; and, just as a dream is more often painful
than happy, so an undertone of melancholy and of pity for all mortal beings
accompanies this flickering tale."
Below what Strindberg wrote in his Diary the day when A Dream Play appeared
in the theatre.
"Am reading about the teachings of Indian
religions. The whole world is but an illusion (= Humbug or relative
meaninglessness). The divine Primary Force (Maham Atna, Tad, Aum, Brahma)
let itself be seduced by Maya or the impulse of procreation. In this the
Divine Primary Element sinned against itself. (Love is sin; that is why
pangs of love are the greatest hell that exists.)
Thus the world exists only through sin, if it exists at all, for it is only
a dream picture (hence my Dream Play is a picture of life), a phantom the
destruction of which is the mission of the ascetic. But this mission
conflicts with the instinct of love, and the sum of it all is a ceaseless
wavering between sensuality and the pangs of remorse. This seems to me the
answer to the riddle of life . . . All day I read Buddhism."
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