Plays

August Strindberg wrote “The Pelican” for his Intimate Theater in 1907 and penned “Isle of the Dead” immediately after as a prologue. The latter was unpublished until 1918 and rediscovered in the early 1960s, when it was found and promptly dismissed as an incomplete fragment.

Strindberg’s play The Father (1887) offers a proto-Freudian explanation of the unreasonable hatred that can exist between husbands and wives. A free-thinking army captain and scientist would have his daughter educated to be a teacher, while his wife would have her become a painter.

Creditors (1888) is August Strindberg’s scandalous successor to Miss Julie. It is the author’s boldest statement about sexuality and one of the boldest ever put to paper. We tend to regard open marriage as unthinkable in Strindberg’s time. It was not.