Photographic Elements of Strindberg’s A Dream Play

Jonathan Schroeder

From August Strindberg and Visual Culture:

the Emergence of Optical Modernity in Image, Text, and Theater

Jonathan Schroeder, Anna Westerståhl Stenport, Eszter Szalczer, editors

proposal under review, June 2015

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Photographic Elements of Strindberg’s A Dream Play

Jonathan Schroeder In 1999, Robert Wilson, the American avant-garde visual artist and theatrical director, staged August Strindberg’s surreal masterpiece, A Dream Play (Ett Drömspel) at the Stockholm City Theater, Stadsteatern. A Dream Play concerns a character called Agnes – or Indra’s daughter – who comes to earth and experiences earthly emotions of love, loss, and longing. Wilson transformed Strindberg’s elliptical, loose narrative, stream of consciousness story into a dazzling visual experience, illuminated with his trademark elaborate, computer-controlled lighting. Wilson’s production, staged for Stockholm’s year as European cultural capital, was a resounding success, and it has since been performed in Nice, New York, and London, described as “a hypervisual, aesthetic installation, stunning to look at – but not all that easy to grasp…” (Gavel Adams 44). The New York Times review of its performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music had this to say: “It does seem to have been a natural, if challenging, match, for the sensibilities of Mr. Wilson, whose favored tools of presentation are visual and aural, as against narrative, an approach to storytelling that has more in common with a symphony conductor or a painter than a director of conventional drama.”(Weber)

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Figure 1 Robert Wilson’s production of A Dream Play, Stockholm, 1999. Stadsteatern Program cover

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In Wilson’s final scene, Agnes begins to slowly walk backwards up a long path

that traverses the entire stage, a ramp, really, that leads up and out of the scene. She is returning to heaven, from where she was sent by her father to see “whether the constant complaints and mournings of humans were justified”. She stepped delicately, each step deliberate, paced. Like a tightrope walker, her movement alone kept the rapt audience on edge. Her gradual ascent and departure probably took around two or three minutes, but time seemed to stand still. Slowly, she began to disappear from my frame of vision.

At some point when watching this scene during the production in Stockholm, I realized that she was going to walk up the ramp; out of sight, and that the play would end. I began to feel sad, almost panicky. I would never see her again. I would never again experience this amazing visual spectacle. It was going to be over.

Upon telling an American friend about the play, he stopped me and asked, “Did you understand it?” I was a bit taken aback. A Dream Play, of course, was performed in Swedish, so I assume he meant did I understand the language, or perhaps was I able to comprehend the basic ideas of the play. And besides, as a perceptive review of the production noted: “Wilson does not interpret Strindberg’s play but rather presents the work to the spectators and invites the spectators to generate an interpretation or a dream for themselves.” (Gavel Adams 45) But the question is an interesting one – it begs for a closer look. What exactly was the “it” that I was to understand, misunderstand, or not understand? I enjoyed the play very much, and was able to see it in France with French subtitles, which I could read fairly well. By that time, my Swedish had improved a bit, so I could also catch more of the actors’ words. Yet the experience of the play was primarily visual; each scene was set up like a photograph that slowly came alive as the action unfolded. As Eszter Szalczer remarked about the play, “the eye has become the source and the target of the dramatic experience.” (Szalczer 50). After reflecting about this central question of interpretation for quite some time, I think I understood a version of the play that struck me deeply – it remains one of my favorite theatrical experiences. But I still find the question curious, and important for any project about images and interpretation.

In some way, compared to a colleague who reviewed the Wilson production for Artforum, I probably got very little out of A Dream Play. In his review, he was able to contrast Wilson’s production to an important historical genealogy of A Dream Play productions, including several by Ingmar Bergman, Sweden’s legendary film and theater director (Birnbaum 92). He noted that Wilson did not draw upon Stockholm imagery for the sets; his settings are much less rooted in time and place, pushing the play into a more international arena. He wondered about the photograph of a house that provided an opening backdrop for the play. The two-story wooden house looked old – solid, yet mysterious. Why did Wilson use this image?

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The photographic backdrop provided my hook into the play. I gave a presentation on Wilson’s A Dream Play at a theater conference in Nice in conjunction with its performance in the European Theatre festival. In the talk, I concentrated on the photograph that opens up the play as a structural device that unifies the entire work. That photograph is a black and white image of a two-story house, with wooden clapboard siding, and steps leading down from the front porch. Two girls are posed in front of the house, one with a bicycle. To me, it looked like an early 20th century image – perhaps of an immigrant household.

Later, back in Stockholm, I was discussing A Dream Play with a colleague who informed me that that photograph was by an American photographer, Frances Benjamin Johnston. In fact, several of A Dream Play sets borrowed from Johnston’s imagery of the Hampton Institute, taken for the 1900 Paris Exposition (Johnston). The Hampton Institute was a vocational training school for African-Americans set up during reconstruction to help train and prepare former slaves for life in post-slavery United States. These photographs reflected a central theme in Johnston’s work – to emancipate the underprivileged through positive representation – and resonate in an uncanny with Swedish ideals of the social welfare state.

Figure 2 A Dream Play, Stockholm, photograph by Lesley Leslie-Spinks, 1998

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Figure 3 A Hampton Graduate’s home, photograph by Francis Benjamin Johnston, 1900

The photographs, exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1966, depict serious, well groomed, hopeful African-Americans and Native Americans, earnestly posing for a famous photographer’s camera, around the turn of the 20th century, a time that coincided closely with Strindberg’s writing of A Dream Play (Kirstein). Johnston was a working photographer who had photographed the Hampton Institute specifically to show the progress made by its’ African-American and Native American pupils. The photographs were first exhibited at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition. They represent the American Dream as well as the fabled “melting pot.” Perhaps Wilson, newly arrived in New York from Texas, had seen the show, and remained in his memory. Johnston’s Hampton Album images supply a spectacular clue to Wilson’s enigmatic staging of A Dream Play. Page after page reveals his visual inspiration for each scene – the house that begins the play is pictured in the photograph “A Hampton Graduate’s home,” a curious scene that involved huge cow figures directly quotes “Agriculture. Sampling Milk,” and the penultimate scene in the play – where the cast gathers on steps and unburdens their innermost wishes – comes from “The Post-graduate Class of 1900.” Wilson’s use of the Johnston’s images catapulted Strindberg’s play into a postmodern visual register, connecting early 20th century photographs and a 1960s exhibition to a contemporary production of a fin de siècle Swedish play. His vision was not tied to the

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play’s Swedish context, realist architecture or Strindberg’s stage directions – and thus expanded Dream Play’s potential to connect with broader, contemporary, and universal themes.

Seeing these photographs – months after attending the play – sent a shiver up and down my spine, as if I was seeing my dreams photographed and reproduced in a rather obscure, decades old, out of print book. In her photographs, “hearts beat, breath is held; time ticks. Eyelids barely flutter. Outside of Hampton there is an ogre’s world of cruel competition and insensate violence, but while we are here, all the fair words that have been spoken to the outcast and injured are true. Promises are kept. Hers is the promised land.” (Kirstein 11). And sure enough, when I had the opportunity to view Wilson’s preparatory sketches and material for staging A Dream Play, several of Johnston’s photographs appear as visual guides for the production. So the photographs were vitally important themes in the play. I had understood that much, after all.

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Figure 4 A Dream Play, Stockholm, photograph by Lesley Leslie-Spinks, 1998

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Figure 5 The improved well (three Hampton grandchildren), photograph by Francis Benjamin Johnston, 1900. From The Hampton Album.

In Wilson’s capable hands, Strindberg’s Dream Play provided a visual experience, much like a film, one that built upon photographic images from a distinctly different time and place, yet which resonates with themes of alienation, assimilation, and prejudice. Wilson visually articulated key aspects of the Swedish twentieth-century experience – the cultivated simplicity of Scandinavian modernism, Sweden’s social democratic engineering efforts to improve the citizenry and ensuing problems with conformity, and the functionalism of the people’s home, as represented by Johnston’s Hampton photographs. Like Wilson’s stage work, Johnston “had a developed personal vision and characteristic style. A simple monumentality in miniature, a sober austere placement of figures….” (Kirstein 9). Wilson’s exaggerated, elongated stage chairs, for example, seem to stand in for, and almost mock, the clean lines of Scandinavian functionalism.

When I showed Swedish friends Johnston’s photographs, many felt as if a puzzle has been solved – what were those images doing in A Dream Play? Wilson had “sampled” images that connected Strindberg’s play to another world, visually linking Agnes’s earthly struggle with African-American and Native American struggles in the United States, with household labor, and with the architecture of home. Strindberg’s universal themes of identity and its quest found a compelling expression in Wilson’s striking visual language that has done so much to open up new possibilities in contemporary theater. Wilson’s A Dream Play also reveals how Strindberg’s work can connect to current aspects of visual culture, including photography, remixing, sampling, and juxtaposition.

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Works Cited Birnbaum, Daniel. “Robert Wilson: Stadsteater, Stockholm” [review of A Dream Play],

Artforum, (February 1999): 92. Gavel Adams, Ann-Charlotte. “From Dream Play to Doomsday: Enter Lepage, Wilson,

Ek. Exit Strindberg. Stagings of A Dream Play 1994-2007.” North-West Passage: Yearly Review of the Centre for Northern Performing Arts Studies, (6, 2009): 39-53.

Johnston, Francis Benjamin. The Hampton Album, New York: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1966.

Kirstein, Lincoln. “Foreword.” In The Hampton Album, by Francis Benjamin Johnston, 5-11. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1966.

Szalczer, Eszter. “Nature’s Dream Play: Modes of Vision and August Strindberg’s Re-Definition of the Theatre.” Theatre Journal, 53 (March 2001): 33-52.

Weber, Bruce. “Strindberg, Influenced by Freudian Sleep.” New York Times, November 30, 2000.