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.
Strindberg’s road to this incendiary night was as jagged and tortured as one of his own characters’ psyches. Born in 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, Johan August Strindberg grew up in a household that itself felt like a battlefield of class and temperament. His father was a shipping agent of aristocratic lineage but diminishing means; his mother had been a servant in the household, brought in to nurse the first wife’s children. August was thus literally the son of a servant and a gentry man – a living mixture of social strata. This heritage preyed on him: he felt both affiliation and resentment toward the upper classes and a conflicted attitude toward his own origins. In his vivid memoir The Son of a Servant, he described a childhood of humiliation and insecurity. His father’s business went bankrupt when August was young, plunging the family into poverty. They moved into a cramped apartment in Stockholm’s slums. School was a torment where wealthier classmates mocked his shabby clothes. His devout, loving mother died when he was thirteen, leaving him in the hands of a cold stepmother. These early wounds – class shame, maternal loss, religious guilt – never left him; instead, they fermented into a furious rebellion against society’s pretenses and a lifelong alternation between craving love and lashing out against those he loved.
Strindberg was whip-smart and volatile from the start. He briefly attended Uppsala University, studying modern languages and aesthetics, but he found the formal education stifling and left without a degree. His real education came from life and self-directed reading – philosophy, science, and literature that stoked his sense of being at war with convention. In his twenties, he lived hand-to-mouth in Stockholm, trying his luck as a journalist, a tutor, a library assistant. He suffered bouts of depression and semi-starvation in attic lodgings, a Nordic echo of so many bohemian writers. All the while, he wrote: satirical newspaper pieces skewering the bourgeoisie, short stories and one-act plays that often got rejected, and his first significant drama, Master Olof (written 1872). Master Olof was a historical play about the Reformation leader Olaus Petri, but really it was Strindberg’s avatar: an idealist battling a corrupt Church and state. When Master Olof was denied production by the Royal Theatre (too long, too radical, they said), the young Strindberg was outraged. That rejection became a cause célèbre, and eventually the play was staged in 1881 after Strindberg trimmed it – garnering acclaim and putting him on Sweden’s literary map. In it, the line “Truth is the greatest of all virtues” encapsulated Strindberg’s emerging ethos.
Meanwhile, his personal life in the 1870s was equally dramatic. In 1877, he married Siri von Essen, a Finnish-Swedish baroness who, bored with aristocratic life, divorced her husband to become an actress and be with Strindberg. It was a passionate, scandalous union: the servant’s son and the noblewoman. They had children and for a time formed a kind of artistic partnership (Siri acted in some of Strindberg’s early plays), but their marriage was tumultuous. Strindberg was intensely jealous and often felt emasculated by Siri’s noble background and independent spirit. His insecurities manifested in ferocious quarrels and increasingly misogynistic musings in his writings. (To be fair, he admired certain women, especially unconventional, “masculine” ones, but he also harbored deep fears and resentments toward women in general, whom he saw as simultaneously attractive and threatening. This inner conflict fuelled much of his drama.)
Throughout the 1880s, Strindberg’s career bloomed and darkened simultaneously. He turned to writing novels and short stories as well, often semi-autobiographical. His novel The Red Room (1879) – a satire of Stockholm society – was a sensation, hailed as the first modern Swedish novel and drawing comparisons to Dickens and Gogol for its biting humor. But he also wrote a collection of short stories called Married (1884) that contained frank portrayals of sexuality and critiques of marriage; he was prosecuted for blasphemy and obscenity because of it (though acquitted). The trial added to his notoriety.
By the mid-1880s, Strindberg was gravitating toward new intellectual influences: Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the emerging philosophy of social Darwinism that cast human life as a pitiless struggle for survival. He read and corresponded with émile Zola, the champion of naturalism in literature, who advocated that writers should examine society with scientific detachment and expose its underbelly. Strindberg absorbed these ideas and merged them with his own bitter marital experiences. The result was a series of plays in the late 1880s that helped inaugurate European naturalist theatre.
The most famous of these is Miss Julie (1888), set on Midsummer Eve in a Count’s estate kitchen, where the aristocratic Miss Julie and her valet Jean engage in a psychological and sexual duel ending in her ruin. Here Strindberg applied Darwinian notions: two animals (Jean often compares himself to a beast, Miss Julie is in heat like a dog in estrus) of different breeds locked in a dominance battle dictated by nature and class. The play’s preface (which Strindberg wrote himself) is a manifesto of naturalism: he insists that characters are complex conglomerates of heredity and environment, that his aim is to be brutally realistic (the stage directions call for a real pantomime cooking scene, real sounds from the partying servants offstage, no acts or breaks in continuity). He even disparages the idea of the “well-made play,” thumbing his nose at theatrical conventions of neat plotting. Miss Julie the text is shocking – it deals openly with sexuality, menstruation (unheard of on stage then), class resentment, and the degeneration of an aristocratic lineage – but in performance it was even more so, as we saw. When it finally got a public production in Berlin in 1892 (after several private and censored showings), it scandalized the audiences not used to such raw content. But theatre would never be the same: Miss Julie became a cornerstone of modern theatre repertoire, studied and revived countless times for its incisive portrayal of power dynamics and gender.
Strindberg didn’t stop at naturalism. As his life progressed, his personal demons multiplied. His marriage with Siri disintegrated (they divorced in 1891, after Strindberg’s paranoia and rages made life unbearable). Separated from his children, he wandered Europe. In the 1890s, living mostly in Berlin and then Paris, he went through what he later called his “Inferno” crisis. During this period he suffered a mental breakdown, dabbling in occult experiments and alchemy (trying to make gold in a makeshift lab), convinced that supernatural forces and persecutors were after him. He documented his descent into near-madness in a memoir called Inferno (1897), a hallucinatory account that reads like part horror story, part spiritual confession. Modern psychiatrists might diagnose Strindberg at this time with paranoia or schizophrenia; he certainly exhibited symptoms – hearing voices, imagining electricity torturing him, seeing everyday events as coded conspiracies.
Remarkably, Strindberg clawed his way out of this abyss by the late 1890s, helped by a turn back to spiritual faith (in mystics like Swedenborg) and a third marriage (after a brief disastrous second marriage) to a young actress, Harriet Bosse. He emerged a changed writer. Gone was the strict naturalist: Strindberg’s later plays embraced a kind of proto-expressionism and symbolism, exploring inner reality through dreamlike scenarios. He led the charge into what would become theatrical modernism of the early 20th century.
The key work signaling this shift is To Damascus (1898–1904), a trilogy that is essentially a surreal spiritual autobiography, with a protagonist called simply “the Stranger” wandering through ever-shifting scenes, accompanied by an enigmatic Woman, meeting figures that may or may not be real, on a quest for meaning. It’s dense and seldom performed now, but it marked Strindberg’s break from realism.
Then came A Dream Play (1902), a seminal avant-garde piece that directly influenced later playwrights like Eugene O’Neill, James Joyce (in his novelistic techniques), and the German expressionists. A Dream Play attempts to mimic the structure of a dream on stage: illogical, fluid, merging scenes, characters transforming. The daughter of the god Indra comes down to earth to live as a human and experience their suffering, encountering a host of archetypal figures (poet, lawyer, officer, mother) each bearing their own misery, feeling compassion but eventually overwhelmed. The play has no fixed linear plot; one scene flows into the next via associative logic (one famous transition: a door in a castle opens and suddenly it’s the door to a humble cottage in the next scene). The line “Time and space do not exist” from the play’s preface became a mantra for breaking theatrical conventions. When first read, critics were baffled or dismissive – it was so far ahead of stage craft capabilities then – but A Dream Play is now considered one of the great precursors to modern theatrical experiment, anticipating Pirandello, the surrealists, Beckett, and more.
In the final years of his life, Strindberg wrote a series of concise chamber plays (around 1907) for the intimate theatrical space he established in Stockholm (the Intimate Theatre). Among these was The Ghost Sonata (1907), often seen as one of the first absurdist dramas. In it, a young student peels back the façade of a seemingly genteel household to find a web of grotesqueries and ghosts – a colonel is actually a mummy-like vampire, a beautiful young woman is slowly dying, people converse in ellipses and grotesque exaggerations. It’s uncanny and haunting, a kind of fevered dream reflecting Strindberg’s lifelong obsessions with betrayal and illusion.
So Strindberg’s legacy is twofold. First, with plays like Miss Julie and The Father, he pushed realism/naturalism further than Ibsen dared: his characters were more volatile, the social criticism more caustic, the sexuality more explicit, the language rougher. He allowed the ugliness of human behavior onto the stage without moral filter. Miss Julie in particular introduced an unprecedented frankness about sex and class and suggested that these primal drives are what really govern human interactions beneath the polite veneer. It also pioneered the one-act full-length play with no interval – a structure many later playwrights would use for intensity.
Second, Strindberg then broke the mold altogether and pioneered non-realistic theatre. If he had died in 1890, he’d be remembered as a major realist/naturalist rival to Ibsen. But he lived to 1912 and in that time basically wrote the playbook (pun intended) for expressionism and absurdism to come. A Dream Play’s influence can’t be overstated: when the surrealists and expressionists around World War I looked for antecedents, they found Strindberg’s later work had already done what they were attempting – free drama from logical plot and let it roam the subconscious.
Moreover, Strindberg is a founder of modern psychological drama. He delved into the neuroses of his characters mercilessly. The term “Strindbergian” often implies a battle-of-the-sexes intensity or dark psychological head games in a play. His own stormy marriages fueled that. The Father is like a case study in a husband driven mad by a cunning wife; Creditors (1888, another brutal little play) shows a woman psychologically draining two men of their self-worth. These pieces have directly influenced later marital/dependency dramas from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Ingmar Bergman’s films (Bergman, also Swedish, was hugely inspired by Strindberg and staged his plays frequently).
Stylistically, Strindberg also pioneered the use of seemingly banal, fragmentary dialogue to convey natural speech rhythms in his realistic plays – something Chekhov would do in Russia around the same time. Then in later plays, he used monologues and symbolic imagery (like the statue of Buddha in A Dream Play or the little dead canary in The Ghost Sonata) to convey thematic content in place of straightforward action.
Strindberg also thought a lot about stagecraft. In his preface to Miss Julie, he talks about using a scrim for the first time on a Swedish stage and about lighting and removing footlights to create more realistic atmosphere – technical suggestions that stage designers later adopted widely. At the Intimate Theatre, he innovated with a smaller stage and chamber setting anticipating the studio theaters of later 20th century.
Perhaps ironically, given his vicious misogynistic outbursts in life, Strindberg’s works offer some of the meatiest female roles too – Julie, Miss Y, the Captain’s wife Laura, etc., which have attracted great actresses (Julie has been tackled by stars from Vivien Leigh to Jessica Chastain; “Miss Julie” itself keeps being adapted, including transposing it to South Africa or into film, speaking to its continued relevance around gender and class). He thought he was showing how terrible women could be, but in doing so he gave women characters agency, cunning, desire – things rarely acknowledged on stage before.
Strindberg’s personal torment – his mental instability, his radical shifts in belief (from atheist to occultist to Christian mystic) – all poured directly into his art, making it extremely visceral. Watching or reading Strindberg, one often feels uncomfortably that you are inside the fevered mind of the playwright; it’s raw, not smoothed for consumption. That rawness is exactly what later artists valued: he was a truth-teller of the unconscious, not just the conscious social problems (where Ibsen focused). Freud was publishing his theories as Strindberg wrote late plays; Strindberg, in a literary way, was already dramatizing how repressed guilt or childhood trauma or sexual complexes play out destructively (as in The Ghost Sonata or Playing with Fire or There Are Crimes and Crimes).
When Strindberg died in 1912 of stomach cancer, tens of thousands attended his funeral – a massive outpouring as if for a national hero, which in a way he was by then. The young Strindberg, who once nearly got arrested for blasphemy and was hounded out of the country by moral guardians, had by the end become a kind of embittered prophet whom even common people recognized as having relentlessly pursued truth. At his funeral, workers and socialists marched – they saw him as a champion of the downtrodden for exposing bourgeois hypocrisy – as did artists and students.
In theatrical evolution, Strindberg stands at the crossroads of the 19th and 20th centuries. He took the realist project of illuminating social conditions to its bleak conclusion and then pivoted to explode the very form of drama to seek truths in the subconscious and spiritual realm. His influence is thus Janus-faced: one face looking back at Ibsen and saying, “Let’s go further into the muck of real life,” and one face looking forward to Beckett and saying, “Real life is a dream, a nightmare of fragmented impressions.”
To this day, a production of Miss Julie or The Father has the power to shock with its frank depiction of the ugliness in relationships – we see reflections of modern toxic relationships, gender battles, and power plays. And a production of A Dream Play or The Ghost Sonata can bewilder and fascinate just as contemporary experimental plays do, because Strindberg broke narrative logic before most had even accepted naturalism.
Think of theatre as a house with successive rooms: Goldoni aired out comedy; Lessing built a new German wing; Schiller and Goethe raised it to noble heights; Ibsen renovated it with electricity and modern plumbing. Strindberg came in, tore down the walls, reconfigured the foundation, dug into the basement and also built strange spires to the sky. He made theatre more intimate (showing the private, cruel whispers of the drawing room) and more expansive (showing the giant shadows of archetypes and dreams). The house of theatre after Strindberg was no longer the same cozy structure; it had secret passageways and shattered mirrors, its inhabitants locked in psychological combat or wandering like somnambulists searching for meaning.
August Strindberg, fiery and mercurial, thus occupies a singular place among those key figures between 1700 and 1850: he comes at the tail end, but like a great comet streaking out of one era into another, he drags the 19th century’s theatre into the dawning 20th. He once wrote, “I am a child of my time, a child of unbelief and doubt,” yet through that doubt he forged new belief – the belief that theatre could depict the unconscious truths and the brutal power struggles that polite society hides. Where earlier dramatists sought to edify or refine, Strindberg sought to provoke and lay bare. In doing so, he helped unleash the full range of what theatre could be – from a microscope trained on a single awkward dinner, to a magic lantern casting dreams on a scrim. That is Strindberg’s legacy: the drama of restless modernity, forever evolving, forever peeling away façades, even if it means leaving us raw and bewildered, confronted by the ghosts within.