intuitive and nuanced...a riveting production

June 29, 2005 performance, by Frances Benn Hall

Strindberg’s angst-driven play, The Father, in a new adaptation by Anders Cato and performed impeccably under his intuitive and nuanced direction is being given a riveting production at the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Unicorn Theatre.

The play, first performed over 125 years ago, is one of the pillars of our contemporary theatre and (despite DNA) remains vital to the very real concerns of marriage everywhere. It is Strindberg’s anguished cry that “between men and women there exists a constant and consuming struggle for power,” and he aimed it at those who found comfort in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House. As such, it remains one of the most gripping psychological dramas in modern theatre.

The father, the Captain, is on stage when the play opens, a huge figure in military uniform replete with buttons and spurs, seemingly very in command but already undermined by an insidious enemy, his wife, Laura.

During the twenty years of this marriage, one about to explode, he has lived in a household of women—wife, mother-in-law, old nurse—who have steadily emasculated him. The tinder of the moment is the struggle over their child, Bertha, who should have been the bond holding them together and becomes the source of the struggle that rips them apart.

Eric Hill as the father disintegrates before our eyes. Never over playing, although this is a play that could easily slip into melodrama but never does, he in the hour and forty minutes of playing time dwindles into an abject child weeping in his nurse’s arms, bound in the snare one side of his personality could not resist.

Woman as mother comforts, woman as wife destroys. In the end he can beg for his uniform coat to cover him, his lion’s skin, and remember at the same time Hercules, also undone, emasculated by a woman.

Laura (Charlotte Maier) is cold, ruthless and clever. She combines her shrewdness with ignorance, her religion with a lack of morality, her kindness to others with diabolical treatment of her husband. She does not dress her dwindled husband in women’s garb but in a confining strait jacket—one she has kept him in for twenty years although he at times thought he was freeing himself.

Lenka Peterson as the Captain’s old nurse really loves him, so much that if he must be subdued, she reluctant but valiant, will disarm him with fairy tales and baby talk and hold him dying in her loving, but also emasculating, arms. This tiny woman is a giant in this play, capable of good and evil. She is real to the toes of her oversized shoes.

Bertha, the girl-child whose education forms the excuse for the tragedy that sweeps across the Captain’s life, is hauntingly and beautifully played by Jill Renee Baker, who gives us both the still half-child, and the emerging woman, one who raised by this mother will all too probably deal harshly with the men in her life.

Strindberg’s genius is that all his characters, bigger than life, but flawed, are real and in this production played with great credibility. David Adkins and Anthony Newfield as Doctor and Pastor are tightly knit into their minor roles as is Michael McComiskey, the hapless corporal whose plight with a woman starts off the tragedy.

This play is suburb Strindberg and so well worth seeing. The costumes are the most meticulously right that I have ever seen, down to the lace on the child’s nightgown and the lapels on the doctor’s coat.

Cato, in eliminating act divisions and running the play straight through, has been able to capture the building degeneration and horror. He has “adapted” Strindberg’s extreme naturalism by adding musical bridges and an expressionistic device not present in the script, the use of a character called “A spirit”, who usually seen through a scrim and seated far above the set, seems a double of the captain and who can conveniently provide the “lamp” thrown in madness.

This character is one to be expected in Strindberg’s later plays that moved into strange mental territories. Here it silently helps the director link the three acts into one, but is a bit bewildering.

However, this is a great play and greatly performed. If Strindberg has been neglected (and he has been) for Ibsen on 20th century stages, his importance to contemporary playwrights and to audiences has not been. His importance was acknowledged by Shaw (that old Ibsenite) when he gave his Nobel prize money for translations of Strindberg’s plays into English.

It was again heralded by O’Neill who brought America the first performance of The Spook Sonata. You unwittingly attest to it if you prefer a play by Tennessee Williams to one by Arthur Miller. And even Miller (a confirmed Ibsen follower) brought touches of Strindberg into his famous play when he gave Willy Loman a cutaway house with a wall one could walk through into a time warp.

Albee called his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But it could be Who’s Afraid of Strindberg? Don’t be!

Go!