ABSTRACT
At the time of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre Strindberg was still unwelcome on the Swedish stage (see Chapter 1). Although The Father (1887) received its Swedish premiere at the Nya Teatern in Stockholm in 1888, it was not until 1908 that the play achieved a breakthrough, with seventy-seven performances at Strindberg’s next theatrical enterprise, the Intimate Theatre (Strindberg 1966a: 12). Miss Julie (1888) was not only banned from public performance in Denmark, it was also barred from the professional stage in Sweden for eighteen years after its completion. In 1890, however, The Father premiered at the Freie Bühne, another influential independent company, founded in Berlin in 1889 by the critic Otto Brahm. The Freie Bühne introduced naturalist drama and production style to Germany by staging the early works of Gerhart Hauptmann and popularising Ibsen and Strindberg. As opposed to Antoine, who worked with amateur performers whom he trained in the naturalistic acting style of his own devising, Brahm engaged professional actors, giving performances on Sundays when the professional theatres were dark. Thus, the title role of The Father was played by Emanuel Reicher, an admired star credited with introducing modern German acting, opposite Rosa Berten’s Laura. This production was Strindberg’s debut outside Scandinavia and his introduction to the German-speaking theatre, in which his work came to affect major modern developments. The German premiere of The Father at the Freie Bühne was soon followed by several significant productions of Strindberg’s other naturalistic plays. Miss Julie was performed on a single night (3 April) in 1892 by Brahm’s experimental company, with Rosa Berten in the title role and Rudolf Rittner as Jean, but because of the heated protests, especially by female audience members, no further performances were attempted. Emanuel Reicher played the Captain in The Father again at the Carltheater in Vienna in 1900, and initiated numerous Hamburg productions. Creditors (1888) was produced at the Residenzteater in Berlin in 1893 with some of the most prominent German actors of the time: Rosa Berten, Rudolf Rittner, and Josef Jarno. In 1899 Jarno was appointed director of the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, where he produced Creditors in his first season, and became an avid promoter of Strindberg in Austria (Ollén 1961: 120, 139, 166). By the time the young Max Reinhardt opened his avant-garde cabaret, the Schall und Rauch in Berlin in 1901, there was a strong Strindberg tradition established in the German-speaking independent theatre. In his Kleines Theater (the successor to Schall und Rauch) Reinhardt produced a series of Strindberg plays, including The Bond (1892) and Crimes and Crimes (1899) in 1902 and the still-scandalous Miss Julie in 1904. Here Julie was played by Gertrud Eysoldt, who later became famous for her talent in presenting ‘degenerated, boldly sensual, intellectually gifted women’, and who achieved great success for several years with her performance as Strindberg’s heroine (Ollén 1961: 138). These initial and sometimes controversial performances by independent companies during Strindberg’s lifetime made him so popular in Germany that in the three years following his death – from 1913 to 1915 – ‘there were more than 1,000 performances of twenty-four of his plays in sixty-two cities’ (Innes 1993: 39).
