Play Strindberg by Friedrich Durrenmatt. Director Neal Roach. New Erektions Fringe Season, Currong Theatre, June 18 - 22. Professional.
"Critics are bastards." "But not imbeciles." Durrenmatt's attempt to undermine the carping class will not stop me. I will carp - about the play, and a little about the production.
Play Strindberg is a late play (1970) in the Durrenmatt canon. A re-working of Strindberg's Dance of Death, it feels as if it belongs to a Europe decades earlier than the social upheaval of 1968.
A "world-renowned military literary gentleman" can never become more than a major, and only then because he is "well-regarded by the colonel". He marries a "famous actress" who nobody has ever heard of. She should have married her cousin who on the rebound marries her friend.
The cousin's marriage breaks up; he spends 15 years "not doing much" except making millions in America; he visits the actress. The military man and the actress stay together despite hating each other. The actress is left at the end of the play with a dead husband and a lover who leaves her, presumably to make more millions. All this is played out absurdly in 12 rounds, like a boxing match.
I think even in 1970 this was old-hat. Ionesco, Beckett, Peter Weiss and Durrenmatt himself had done it all before, and better from the mid-1940's to the early 1960's. It's a play satirising a class structure which, even in Durrenmatt's Switzerland, was rapidly changing.
Yet done in the right style, Play Strindberg is a nasty nihilist farce about marriage. Sarah Snell (Alice), Peter Robinson (her husband Edgar) and Lachlan Abrahams (the cousin) have the elements of the style correct. First night was not well paced and only some of the unexpected changes in mood were done well enough to cause the nervous laughter that Durrenmatt aimed at, but the actors are good enough for this to improve through the season.
Roach's changed setting from a Danish island to "somewhere in or beyond far north Australia" doesn't work: the script is too European. The design needs a big expressionistic style, inspired by Andy Warhol or the later Super-Realist painters, to lift the play out of apparently ordinary intimacy.
An interesting but not thoroughly exciting production.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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