August Strindberg wrote Creditors while he was married to Siri Von Essen. It's said that she played the barrel organ and taunted her husband by suggesting that their daughter may not be his child. Charming.
Mdme Siri had divorced her first husband, a baron, to marry Strindberg, and the playwright had some reservations about this. In Creditors he writes about a woman and her second husband who says of her “She was fully formed when I met her”. We see the intruding ghost of Siri's baron here.
But enough contextualism.
The young man is led to doubt her fidelity by a new friend, an older man, a Strinbergian Iago. Strindberg makes it clear that he’s dramatizing the doubt within the young fellow when his new buddy tells him “I do not exist. Only you do”.
The Donmar Warehouse production of Creditors has come to BAM from London “in a new version by David Grieg”. It’s brilliant, with acting as intense as Strindberg’s emotional tempest. Anna Chancellor in the bravura role of the wife is stunning in her command of technique an emotional grounding. She can act with subtle subtext or, when the occasion demands, abandon. Between the three characters there’s an excruciating series of emotions culminating in a resolution of brutal intensity. No one matches Strindberg when it comes to staging emotions as conflicting characters. They argue the way Shavian characters do, but instead of tossing around intellectual issues, they explore emotional ones.
Ben Stones’ set is a wonder itself, colorless with waves of light, far from realism. It has the sparsity we associate with asylums for the insane, where objects are minimal so people don’t do themselves harm, and it’s chilling. The boards show on the whitewashed walls that seem to get dirty as the play progresses. The grand skylights expose only rain outside. Not a ray of sunshine here.
Director Alan Rickman has put all this intense acting in the same key and kept the whole show crystal clear and precise. He’s put humor into Strindberg through careful details of line-delivery and blocking, and he wisely knocks it off after the first half of the play. The premise is that Strindberg intended the humor, but it’s difficult to believe this is what he had in mind when the play appeared in 1889. Does this laughter come from the script? Or does it reflect our distance from melodrama, our condescension to it?
But then, it’s impossible for us to experience the play the way Strindberg’s audience did. Richman’s choices are probably as true as the somber interpretations of Strindberg we’re accustomed to.
April 2010
