August Strindberg (1849-1912)

 August Strindberg was a Swedish dramatist who wrote some 70 dramatic pieces. He is best known outside his native Sweden for a small number of plays that represent the range of his achievement. The Father, Miss Julie, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata have earned him stature alongside Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw as seminal figures in the early years of modern drama. 
August Strindberg’s drama falls into two distinct periods, separated by the years of his personal Inferno. The pre-Inferno plays are naturalistic in form and concerned with sexual and class struggles. His late, expressionistic plays, written after a period of intense despair and nonproductivity, reflect the emphasis on the atonement that characterizes later writing. These plays are important, especially for the ways in which they extend the boundaries of dramatic form.
Strindberg’s early plays reflect the literary preoccupation of the time with the philosophy of naturalism. The Father, produced and published in 1887, is considered the first of his great naturalistic plays. His personal conflicts were to expand during the Inferno Period, reflected in religious and historical plays produced between 1897 and 1901. In those years, he turned to mysticism and allegory, as in the Damascus trilogy.
Strindberg’s most successful plays are “A Dream Play” and “The Ghost Sonata”, his two most successful efforts. In the earlier play, the recurrent lament of the daughter of Indra is, “Humankind is to be pitied”, reflecting the deep sadness of the playwright. Like the Captain in the father. Strindberg was haunted by the knowledge that a man can never know with
The certainty that he is his child’s father. Laura’s manipulations are not less effective than those of Iago, and she emerges as the uncontested champion in this domestic duel of wills. In the final tableau, the straitjacketed Captain lies helpless at the nurse’s breast, repudiating his child, then falls in a fatal stroke; his wife, embracing Bertha, cries, “My Child!”.
The Ghost Sonata (1908)
   The Ghost Sonata is one of Strindberg’s chamber plays, so named for their intimacy and lyricism. The dominant consciousness in the play is a student named Arkenholz, who progresses through the symbolic episodes of the dream. In the deepest room of the house is the Hyacinth Girl, the vision of beauty and love that the student cannot resist.
A German student seeks to enter the world of Hans Arkenholz, an old man in a wheelchair who tells him how to get into the Wagnerian manor house where he first encounters Hummel. The student observes Hummel’s inhumane treatment of the colonel’s wife and hears of a network of sexual relationships as the residents of the house gather for their ritual supper. In the Hyacinth Room, the clock that stood prominently on the mantle in the Round Room has been replaced by a statue of the Buddha. 
Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata is a richly evocative vision of guilt and expiation, of innocence and evil, that extends to all humankind. As a student begins to awaken from his dream, he speaks of what he has learned, reconciling the woe that he has discovered and the innocence in which he had believed. Strindberg claimed that writing the play was a painful experience, that he hardly knew himself what he has written, but that he felt in it the sublime.