August Strindberg

The mortal conflict of the sexes, traced here by Strindberg in the clash between an aristocratic young woman and her valet. Ms. Stockenstrom's new translation retains the rhythm and emotional feel of the original while making the prose more playable for today's audiences.

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Bored with her sheltered existence, Miss Julie attempts to seduce the footman, but gets far more than she bargained for... August Strindberg's classic naturalistic play Miss Julie was written in 1888, and first performed at Strindberg's experimental theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1889, despite being banned by the censor. This English version, translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish, is published in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series. The volume also includes Strindberg's Preface.

By far Strindberg's most aggressive work, The Father is a feverish nightmare of the struggle he saw between defiant masculinity and the "treacherous weakness" of woman. Mr. Brustein's adaptation takes account of modern feminist sensibilities without diminishing the play's relentless power and furious conclusion.

Strindberg's most important and most frequently performed plays - "The Father", "Miss Julie", "A Dream Play", "The Dance of Death", and "The Ghost Sonata" - are gathered together here in translations praised for their fluency and their elegance.

This volume contains three of Strindberg's most famous plays, spanning twenty years of prodigious creativity and recurrent personal crises: The Father, which displays Strindberg's suspicion of women at its most implacable, 'powerful and profound' (Guy de Maupassant); Miss Julie (1888), which he called his masterpiece, and in which he presents with startling modernity the conflict between sexual passion and social position; and The Ghost Sonata (1907), written in physical pain and spiritual torment, which is a phantasmagoric dream play, 'a direct source for the Theatre of the Absurd' (Martin Esslin)." Michael Meyer is the translator most actors turn to when seeking a definitive text" (Sunday Times)

During the past two decades, The Dance of Death, Strindberg’s long and taxing family drama, has come to be considered his masterpiece. Produced by major companies in New York and London, filmed once with Erich von Stroheim and then with Sir Laurence Olivier in the lead, adapted by Friedrich Dürrenmatt as Play Strindberg, and a direct influence on Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Dance of Death has established itself as one of the key works of the modern theater.

The three plays in this volume focus on the tumultuous relationships between men and women, whether they are father and daughter, brother and sister or lovers. Miss Julie is a ruthlessly realistic depiction of an upper class woman's seduction of a servant, emphasizing the differences and the antagonism between them. In The Father a man is brought to madness and driven out of his home by the suspicion that his daughter is not his own child, while Easter centres on a family in need of redemption for its sins and suffering, finding forgiveness at a season of rebirth. Strindberg's acute psychological analysis and his dramatization of naked emotion within a naturalistic domestic setting make him one of the great innovators of the modern theatre.