The Father (review)

Figure 1.

The Captain (Krister Henriksson) and Laura (Stina Ekblad) in the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm’s production of August Strindberg’s The Father, directed by Staffan Valdemar Holm. Photo: Bengt Wanselius.

Figure 2.

The Captain (Krister Henriksson) and Bertha (Anna Björk) in the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm’s production of August Strindberg’s The Father, directed by Staffan Valdemar Holm. Photo: Bengt Wanselius.

Figure 3.

Bertha (Anna Björk) in the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm’s production of August Strindberg’s The Father, directed by Staffan Valdemar Holm. Photo: Bengt Wanselius.

As the final curtain fell on Staffan Valdemar Holm’s production of Strindberg’s The Father at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, the impression left was that the Swedish company has found a manner of plunging into the depths of the human psyche with a kind of frigid intensity unlike anything seen elsewhere in Western Europe or North America. The performance opened with a pantomime invented by the director: the young Bertha saunters out in front of the curtain, smoking a cigarette and wearing the kind of short girlish dress popular among today’s urban hipsters. With smirking coyness she eyes the audience as David Bowie’s “Starman” blares out from her portable stereo. As she runs off the stage, the curtain opens to reveal the Captain’s front parlor, which remains the center of conflict for the entire performance.

A stylized shrine to patriarchy, the room was dominated by three heavy black leather chairs, the back wall adorned from top to bottom with hunting trophies, and the entire room lined with old-fashioned iron radiators, suggesting an exaggerated need for artificial heat in this somber environment. Designed by Bente Lykke Moller, the set recalled a spartan gentlemen’s club rather than the nineteenth-century parlor signaled in the stage directions. Even the fateful oil light is replaced by a heavy metal floor lamp, which, when thrown by the Captain at the end of the first act, hits his controlling wife in the face, leaving her visibly bruised for the second half of the play. It is in this space that the Captain, enveloped in cigar smoke and dressed in a black military uniform, interrogates the young soldier suspected of having impregnated a servant girl. It is the soldier’s matter-of-fact response, that a man can never truly know whether or not he is the father to his children, which leads to the Captain’s eventual psychological breakdown and death.

Holm’s mise-en-scène emphasized an irreconcilable difference between the realm of the masculine and the feminine. By incarnating on stage three female characters who remain unseen in Strindberg’s text—Laura’s mother, the governess, and the pregnant servant girl—Holm brought to life the otherwise invisible world of women by which the Captain feels so threatened. In many staged versions of The Father, the Captain and his wife Laura express moments of regret at their doomed relationship. In this production, however, neither the domineering Captain (Krister Henriksson) nor his relentlessly composed though physically battered wife (Stina Ekblad) give any hint of sentimental regret. The two sides are at an impasse, and it is in fact the world of the feminine which, in the latter half of the production, gradually gains control of the dramatic space.

To enhance the feel of a female-dominated space, Holm added a spiritualist seance at the beginning of act 2. The room, inhabited exclusively by the women characters, is now bathed in red light, and the trophies are conspicuously absent from the rear wall. When the Captain finally manages to break through the blocked doorway, he is burdened under the weight of an enormous wooden cross, ready to be crucified by his enemies. In this second half of the drama, he is in fact much less the figure of the archetypal father than of the son. This fact becomes...