Published by Yale University Press
While Sue Prideaux was writing Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream she became increasingly fascinated by Munch’s friend August Strindberg. Novelist, satirist, poet, photographer, painter, alchemist and hellraiser, Strindberg is principally known, in Arthur Miller’s words, as ‘the mad inventor of modern theatre’.
In Miss Julie Strindberg wrote the first psychodrama, taking the theatre out of the polite drawing room into the snakepit of psychological warfare. The tale of a servant who seduces the Count’s daughter, Miss Julie is one of the roles great actresses aspire to. Famously she has been played by both Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren. In September 2012, Juliette Binoche will be playing Miss Julie at the Barbican theatre in London (dresses by Lanvin).
In August Strindberg: A Life, Sue Prideaux reveals, for the first time, the real people on whom he based Miss Julie and her servant Jean, the bizarre circumstances in which the play was written and the suicide that served as the model for the play’s shattering ending. Even more than most, Strindberg is a writer whose life sheds invaluable light on his work, which he based unashamedly upon it: ‘I dissect the corpse I know best; learning anatomy, physiology, psychology and history from the carcass.’
Strindberg’s milieu was fin-de-siecle Paris and Berlin, among the post-Darwinians who were questioning the idea that the physical world exhaustively described reality and the self was a mere evolutionary result. He painted and debated with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, shared a wife with Frank Wedekind, corresponded with Nietzsche, flirted with the Paris Occult and studied Charcot, Bernheim and Jeune, the teachers of Freud.
Strindberg is less well known than his two great contemporaries, Ibsen and Chekhov, but his influence is pervasive. Not just Arthur Miller but also Kafka, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Mann, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Luigi Pirandello acknowledge their debt to him.
Prideaux’s great talent is to organise Strindberg’s dramatic and chaotic life into a gripping and highly readable narrative. It is a dispassionate book that both illumines Strindberg’s work and restores humour and humanity to a man often shrugged off as too difficult.
Where did Miss Julie come from? That was one of the reasons I wanted to write Strindberg’s biography. It’s such a great step beyond Ghosts (1881), the most modern thing on stage at the time which, however shocking the story, takes the shape of a conventional well-made play with lots of characters each fulfilling a specific plot function and speaking in tennis-match to-and-fro dialogue. Miss Julie is so much more modern: a spare two-hander based on psychological veracity and non-sequential dialogue.
I knew that the play had been written over July and August in the year 1888, and this propelled the first research trip to the area Strindberg was living at the time. One lucky chance led me to the very house he had lived during the writing of the play. It sounds easy but discovery was not obvious, much had happened to the place in the intervening 125 years, including a name change. Once there, the local librarian and local historians and scholars were generous with contemporary newspapers, photographs and background material. It was touching to read Strindberg’s letters, diaries, and family accounts of that time, particularly that of Strindberg’s daughter. I walked the rooms of the house tracing events and I followed their footsteps in the grounds that also played their part during those dramatic months of 1888. In that way I was able to piece together the day-by-day relationship between Strindberg’s life and what he was writing. Finally, there was his Promemoria för eget bruk, his notes to himself on those events written in small, cramped writing and intended as his defence in a court of law against the charge of rape that had been brought against him.
The rape charge rightly collapsed; there was no rape, just one consensual sexual encounter on Midsummer’s Eve – that selfsame Eve on which, in the play, Miss Julie is ruined by the act of sexual intercourse with her servant. Art and Life. It was a spine-shivering research trip of discovery, a great start to the long journey of writing the book.
