Normally, it takes an ill-advised midnight snack of jarlsberg and laudanum to attain the state induced by Katie Mitchell’s production of Strindberg’s notoriously “impossible” A Dream Play. It is, quite literally, the stuff of dreams, an audaciously free-handed re-working of the 1901 play that was written to re-create the mechanics of the subconscious and was originally underpinned by such designer-friendly stage directions as: “As the castle burns, the bud on the roof bursts open into a giant chrysanthemum.” After all, when Strindberg wasn’t painting doomy landscapes (this production is a collaboration between the National Theatre and Tate Modern, which is currently exhibiting his pictures), he was exploring alchemy or keeping an “occult diary”. Linear logic is hardly a given.
As in a dream, where your own mother is just as likely to appear as a cat or the Queen, if Strindberg met this play now, he would probably take it for his Uncle Olof or his ex-wife, so drastically has it been restructured. Yet it is so true to the adventuring spirit of the piece, it is hard to imagine that he would mind. Not only has Caryl Churchill thoroughly resculpted the play, shifting the emphasis to the stockbroker, Alfred (Angus Wright), and changing the form of Indira’s daughter, the original visiting angel, Mitchell and her cast have also extensively reworked this reworking, incorporating their own dream material into Churchill’s script. Beautiful, comic and disturbing images flit across the stage: women pushing chairs slowly across the floor in a strange tango; children hanging in closets; a crying baby under a trap door; burly ballerinas dancing with briefcases. Teeth crumble out of Alfred’s mouth, skittering over the stage like ball bearings. Tables move on their own, sometimes demanding to be patted like dogs.
There is a narrative thread, but you wouldn’t want to rely upon it to lead you out of the labyrinth: all you know — and you are not entirely sure you know this — is that it is the 1950s and Alfred has fallen asleep at his desk. An angel who looks remarkably like his PA, Agnes (Lucy Whybrow), has come down to earth to “find out what it means to be a human being”, while Alfred’s ex-wife, current spouse and long-dead mother (biographical echoes of Strindberg’s own life) torment and bewilder him further. Just as the back wall of Vicki Mortimer’s enigmatically blank set slides backwards and forwards, so these characters shift and merge, as likely to turn up underneath a bed or on top of a desk as they are to grow wings or leap out of cupboards.
It is widely acknowledged that there are few things more boring than hearing other people recount their dreams, not least when they seem to believe that their tales of meeting a squash-playing alien on the set of EastEnders mark them out as a mental renegade. Instead, this Jung-at-heart production taps into the universal, eschewing individual analysis for a long, hard look at the collective consciousness. Alfred is forced to dance and sing in public; he is stripped of his clothes by committee; his weaknesses are broadcast over a station Tannoy system. There is a won- derful moment where he finds himself back at school, bullied by a teacher because he can’t do simple sums. “I’m a stockbroker — I don’t know why I’m being told off,” he pouts.
It is often very funny, mainly because it is so gloriously familiar, a spotlit parade of those fears and feelings that are normally kept within the private and murky confines of the skull. Seeing them so explicitly played out is liberating, disproportionately comic, like a repressed Victorian gentleman reduced to hysterics by the flash of an ankle. The laughter here is of recognition, an admission that you recognise the vulnerability, the fear, the guilt and shame that might be successfully repressed during waking hours, but find a way to well up again at night like some psychological lava lamp.
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Wright is a marvellous fixed co-ordinate in this landscape, his sensitivity and deftness showing, whether he is a child — tongue sticking slightly out of his mouth, playing a game of musical chairs he can never win — or an uptight, anxious adult. Although the rest of the cast are dynamic — Anastasia Hille as Alfred’s dead mother, languorously washing her hair in a bowl; Kristin Hutchinson as his stroppy ex-wife, Rachel — their performances are largely subsumed in the ebb and flow of the material and the dazzling staging. For Mitchell is a perfect match for this play: in past productions, her actors have often appeared to be suspended in amber, distorted as if time is slowly being dripped onto them through a pipette. Here, with uncanny control, characters speed up in a Chaplinesque frenzy or grind into a slo-mo crawl. You can feel your inner ear spinning out of control, a loss of balance, both physical and mental. Glitches and blips are the rule, not the exception, such as the sudden, inexplicably authoritative announ- cement during a performance of Giselle: “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s clear all the way to the bottom. Thank you.”
What looks like metaphysical movement has been painstakingly orchestrated by Mitchell and her choreographer, Kate Flatt, and yet you get a sense of the frantic activity powering this play, just as the body of a sleeper pulses and digests while the mind runs free and wild. Just performing A Dream Play is an act of will; making it so entertaining, touching and theatrically effective is a real achievement. Complicated, dense, often bewildering, at times, it’s as clear as mud. But as the man says, it’s clear all the way to the bottom.
A Dream Play
Cottesloe, National, SE1, Four stars