ABSTRACT
The Great Highway was written in 1909, when Johan August Strindberg was sixty. Divorced for the third time, he was living alone in the high Stockholm apartment he called “The Blue Tower.” His health was failing and he had the urge to write, as his farewell to life, one more drama of the journey, in which he, as the Hunter, could express the unending conflict in himself between the terrible heights of heaven and the dear but dirty plains of earth. Strindberg’s first pilgrimage play, To Damascus, written ten years before, was a trilogy, and his autobiographical novels run into many volumes; but he condensed his soul’s experience into a single composition with seven scenes. The Great Highway was given a single performance at Strindberg’s own Intimate Theatre in Stockholm in 1910, but after this, was seldom seen until it was revived with a distinguished cast at Stockholm’s Royal Theatre to celebrate the centenary of Strindberg’s birth in January 1949.
