THE last time we saw Strindberg’s A Dream Play, four years ago at the Barbican, the American auteur Robert Wilson was the director and the piece ran for three hours of prettified tedium. Now that Katie Mitchell is staging Caryl Churchill’s adaptation of the play it’s half the length, twice as visually arresting, and ten times as riveting. The only question is: how true is it to Strindberg?
Indira’s daughter doesn’t descend from Heaven to sample the doubtful joys of Earth and return skywards in a mix of dismay, disillusion and compassion for human suffering. As Mitchell and her cast have re-adapted Churchill’s adaptation, it begins with a 1950s London broker, Angus Wright’s anxious, driven Alfred, falling asleep at his desk, seeing angels at the window, and being transported to a series of outré scenes that are and aren ‘t faithful to the nightmarish surrealism of the original play.
We get the episode in which an officer, this time transformed into Alfred, waits at a stage door for a beloved diva, getting older, more decrepit and finally wheelchair-bound as she fails to appear. We get an acrimonious Strindberg-style marriage between Indira’s daughter, renamed Agnes, and a lawyer. We get newly-weds who, aware that happiness can’t last, commit suicide. We get an updating of the scene in which academics wrangle, open a locked door and find the meaning of life: emptiness.
What we don’t quite get is Strindberg’s state-of-mankind play: a logically illogical journey into a troubled soul, a coherently incoherent attempt to explore and sum up our needs, pains, guilts, fears, hopes and desperate disappointments. In the original, Indira’s child keeps repeating “humans are to be pitied”. Here Lucy Whybrow’s sweet but seriously underused Agnes simply says: “I feel sorry for people, they find things so difficult.” It’s not strong enough to make its point or give the production unity.
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Never mind. There are compensations galore. Mourners reappear, sometimes with corpses on tables, sometimes not. So do ballerinas of both sexes, sedately dancing in white taffeta frocks. A child’s game of hide-and-seek turns ugly when a cupboard is opened and two hanged dolls are revealed. Someone very like Queen Victoria knights Alfred: which makes it doubly embarrassing when, as in Strindberg, he’s sent back to school to be brusquely re-educated or, as not in Strindberg, he loses a game of musical chairs or is suddenly presented by an elegant lady with a penis that he assumes, rightly or wrongly, to be his own broken one.
The staging is stunning yet simple, with that shipwreck fully evoked by rolling, turning, twisting furniture and anguished, screaming people. With Anastasia Hille, Dominic Rowan and others giving their all as Alfred’s relatives, friends and conjugal foes, the acting is pretty good too. I must admit, though, that the doubling and trebling sometimes combined with the fragmented narrative to leave me unsure of who was who. But that’s dreams for you.
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