Venues
Events
VideoTheater
Emotional Debt Dramatized
August Strindberg’s Creditors, a revenge tragicomedy
Tom Burke, Anna Chancellor (Photo: Hugo Glendinning)
| | More
Literary, screen and stage stars come together in the US premiere of August Strindberg’s Creditors (Fordringsägare). Translated and adapted by Scottish playwright and theatre director David Grieg, Creditors is produced by the renowned Donmar Warehouse. Director Alan Rickman brings his critically acclaimed London cast to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.
This is the story of three people whose emotional, psychological and physical battles explore the currency exchange of jealousy and desire. An invalid painter, Adolph is the second husband of a novelist, Tekla. Whilst she is away on a trip, Gustav, her disguised ex-husband, befriends and infatuates Adolph in an almost hypnotic fashion. Gustav engages in a sadistic form of vengeance, the opening dialogue shows Adolph goaded into giving up his crutches to the perverse satisfaction of Gustav. This kind of dark comedy presents us with a grotesquely comical picture of 1880s Sweden that finds an echo in the sexual relations of the modern world.
Sold out in London, critics praised Owen Teal’s “excellently calculating yet troubled” (The Independent) Gustav, Anna Chancellor’s “erotic tour de force” (The Telegraph) as Tekla and the way in which Tom Burke “harrowingly conveys the mental and physical disintegration of the second husband” (The Telegraph).
Considered Strindberg’s most mature play, Creditors was produced in 1888 during his ultra-naturalistic period along with the more famous The Father and Miss Julia. Often charged with misogyny, in Creditors Strindberg explores the complexities of the battle of the sexes to their fullest extremes. Furthermore, this production moves away from a skewed visualisation of the play that has so often been reduced to being only about men and women. By moving the focus onto the psychological journey of insanity, Rickman’s conceptualisation puts sexual insecurity, violence, morality and art all under the magnifying glass. In this way the audience is invited to engage with a magnificently disturbing depiction of destruction.
Creditors runs from April 16 to May 16 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For more information, please visit www.bam.org.