REVOLUTION OF THE STAGE 1700–1850
August Strindberg – Expressionism & the unconscious
It is a sultry Midsummer Eve in 1889, past midnight. In a cramped upstairs hall of a Copenhagen student club, by the flicker of gaslight, an illicit theatrical experiment reaches its climax. On a makeshift stage – really just a cleared space at one end of the room – a young woman in a tattered silk evening dress stands rigid, a straight razor glinting in her hand. Across from her, a man in a servant’s livery whispers urgently. The woman’s face, once proud and haughty, is drained of color; her eyes stare as if at some horror only she sees. The man – her father’s valet – slowly intones, with a mix of cold command and pity: “Go now, Miss Julie.” A long silence. The audience, packed onto benches mere feet away, leans in, scarcely breathing. Miss Julie, nobleman’s daughter, draws a shuddering breath. Then, with a slight nod of her head – is it in obedience? resignation? – she turns and walks steadily offstage into the darkness beyond the doorway, the razor clutched to her breast. A moment later, from somewhere behind the makeshift set, there is a terrible thud. Several women in the audience gasp; one stifles a cry. The lights are snuffed out. August Strindberg’s new play Miss Julie has ended in the suicide of its heroine – a count’s daughter seduced and cast aside by a servant – and for a moment no one knows what to do. There is no curtain to fall in this tiny club theater, no polite music to soften the blow. The spectators sit in total dark silence, confronted with the rawness of what they’ve witnessed: lust, class hatred, manipulation, and despair, all playing out not in far-away palaces or ancient times, but in a kitchen, a present-day kitchen with a real frying pan and real blood of a slaughtered bird on the table.
Then pandemonium erupts. When the gaslights hiss back on, some audience members bolt for the exit, muttering about indecency. A few students, eyes shining, applaud vigorously – they know they have seen something daring and new. But dominating the reaction is outrage. A middle-aged gentleman, red with anger, exclaims, “This is filthy! Shame!” A society matron fanatically fans herself, as if to ward off contamination. The little performance was semi-private, put on by a progressive society since no mainstream theatre would touch this scandalous play, but news of it will spread quickly. Within days, Copenhagen’s papers are printing shocked reviews of Miss Julie’s “repulsive” content – the fornication across class, the suggestion of menstrual influence on Julie’s “hysteria,” the frank portrayal of primal struggle between man and woman. One critic thunders that the play “wallow[s] in muck and darkness.” Another, however, praises its fearless truth to the baser aspects of human nature. As the debate churns, August Strindberg – the play’s author, who directed this premiere himself – observes quietly from the sidelines, a thin smile on his lips. At 40, Strindberg has long been used to causing storms; indeed, he relishes it. He knows that the theatrical revolution he seeks will feed on controversy like this. Let them squirm, he thinks. The era of genteel make-believe on stage is over.
