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In an interview before his production of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, the director Michael Blakemore reported telling the cast to aim for “Strindberg with laughs”. The line suggests a gulf between the Swedish dark tragedian and English light comedian but the dramatists have a curious affinity.
August Strindberg’s Creditors (1889) and Coward’s Private Lives (1930) both start in hotels where a troubled couple is haunted by a former marriage. It’s unclear if the influence was conscious but, if so, would have been apposite. Strindberg identified his drama as a “tragicomedy”, the genre in which, as Blakemore recognised, Coward is increasingly seen to belong.
This revival by Tom Littler (an accomplished Coward and Strindberg director) finds both the gasps and guffaws in Creditors, through a darkly sardonic version (from a literal translation by Agnes Broomé) by Howard Brenton, himself a tragicomic playwright, whose superb Churchill in Moscow was recently directed by Littler at this cramped but dynamic Orange Tree theatre.
Adolf, a twitchy artist exhibiting signs of physical and mental illness, is working on a clay model of a naked woman in the hotel parlour when interrupted by Gustaf, a fellow guest who has become a rather coercive mentor, having, through a fierce critique, turned Adolf from painting to sculpture. Gustaf also encourages the other man to talk about his wife, Tekla, a novelist who wrote a book fictionalising her “idiot” ex-husband and has taken a holiday from the holiday after a row over her alleged flirtations. She will soon return and Gustaf coaches Adolf in what to do and say. We sense that, as smoothly and ruthlessly as the Marquise in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Gustaf is setting traps and, by the time Tekla comes in, suspect Gustaf’s identity and mission.
A sense of event comes from the reunion of Charles Dance, Geraldine James and Nicholas Farrell four decades after their performances in ITV’s indelible The Jewel in the Crown. Back on stage after an absence of 17 years, Dance remains a magnetic presence, eyes flashing with amusement and menace between barked half laughs. In the difficult part of Adolf, a stooge and fool, Farrell makes the man pathetic in the classical sense of eliciting sympathy rather than the modern inference of contemptuous.
Modern audiences can understandably have a problem with the misogyny that may have been present in Strindberg and is certainly there in Gustaf, who claims that a naked woman looks like an incomplete man. But the warm, engaging Tekla of James mitigates this issue by suggesting that the woman has been slandered by both men. In the final reckoning with Gustaf, she becomes clearly the moral centre of the piece.
Exploring how people use each other up in love and art, this Creditors – the title encapsulating Strindberg’s grim metaphor of relationships as a series of loans to be noted and eventually collected – leaves us in debt to Littler, Brenton and the remarkable cast.
This chilling portrait of private lives deserves a long public one.
