"I dream, therefore I exist."
Tonight we watched August Strindberg's wonderful expressionistic drama, A Dream Play, at the National Theatre's Cottesloe. Born out of Strindberg's despair over the collapse of his (third) marriage, the play distorts time and space to produce a fantasy dream sequence of the pain and joy, memories and fears of a man in the throes of mental meltdown: the horror of his teeth falling out, the wistfulness of watching his mother washing her hair, the terror of being caught near-naked on an operatic stage, the frustration of being stuck in an infinite loop of unrequited love. Characters and scenes come into focus for fleeting moments only and you begin to realise that it doesn't matter which is real and which is dream life.
The effect is both ecstatic and terrifying, heightened by the black-painted intimacy of the theatre hall and by the fact that we were just three rows back from the stage. Though such spatio-temporal suspensions are narrative conventions now, the ideas were considered revolutionary at the time of Strindberg's writing in 1901 and foreshadowed Freud's theories about the divisions between the conscious and unconscious.
Strindberg was an amazingly productive and prolific autodidact. He was a dramatist, an essayist, a painter, a photographer, and even an alchemist, and I can't wait for the Tate Modern's retropective of his paintings coming soon.
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