by In an interview before his production by Noël Cowards Blith Spirit, the director Michael Blakemore reported the line -up that she should strive for “Strindberg with Lachs”. The line indicates a golf between the Swedish dark and English light comedian, but the playwrights have a strange affinity.
August Strindberg’s creditor (1889) and Cowards private life (1930) begin in hotels, in which a restless couple are haunted by an earlier marriage. It is unclear whether the influence was aware, but if so, it would have been suitable. Strindberg identified his drama as a “tragicomedy”, the genre in which coward, as Blakemore recognized, increasingly belonged to it.
This revitalization by Tom Littler (an experienced director of Feigling and Strindberg) finds both the cheese and laughs in creditors, through a dark Sardonian version (from a literal translation by Agnes Broomé) by Howard Brenton, even a tragicomic dramikright, whose Superb Churchill in Moscow was directed in Moscow.
Adolf, an artist that has a sign of physical and mental illnesses, works on a sound model of a naked woman in the Hotel Salon when he is interrupted by Gustaf, a guest who has become a rather forced mentor who has become sculptures through a violent criticism by Adolf. Gustaf also encourages the other man to talk about his wife Tekla, a writer who wrote a book who fictional her ex-husband with her “idiot” ex-husband and made a vacation from vacation after a row about her alleged flirting. She will soon return and Gustaf trains Adolf in what to do and say. We feel that Gustaf sets DieRereuses as smoothly and ruthlessly as the marquise in Liiafe’s, and until Tekla comes in, Gustaf’s identity and mission suspects.
A feeling of event comes from the reunification of Charles Dance, Geraldine James and Nicholas Farrell four decades after their appearances in ITVS indelible jewel in the crown. Back on stage after an absence of 17 years, dance remains a magnetic presence. The eyes flash half with an amusement and threat between Bell. In the difficult part of Adolf, a thrust and fool, Farrell makes the man in the classic sense, sympathy, and not the modern conclusion of contempt.
The modern audience understandably can have a problem with the misogyny that may have been present in Strindberg, and is certainly there in Gustaf, who claims that a naked woman looks like an incomplete man. But James’s warm, committed Tekla alleviates this problem by indicating that the woman was slandered by both men. In the last billing with Gustaf, it clearly becomes the moral center of the play.
These creditors investigate how people stand up in love and art – the title – the title – the title of Strindberg’s dark metaphor of relationships as a series of loans and can finally be captured and finally captured – lets us Little, Brenton and the remarkable cast in debt.
This frightening portrait of private life earns a long public.
• In the Orange Tree Theater, London, until October 11th
