The Father

Written in 1887, the year before Strindberg’s most famous play, Miss Julie , and only a few years after Ibsen’s A Doll’s House , The Father deals with the same theme of male versus female domination. Laura and Adolf have a daughter, Bertha, whom they both wish to claim as their own. Laura tells Adolf that (in those pre-DNA days) he cannot be sure he is her real father. Wrestling with this thought, driven mad by Laura’s malice, and finally betrayed even by Bertha, Adolf is last seen being strapped into a straitjacket…This extraordinarily modern take on the eternal battle of the sexes combines naturalism and expressionism to startling effect, so that the audience never quite knows what is real, what is the projection of the characters’ highly pitched emotions. Mike Poulton, the author of this spiky new version, comes to Strindberg via enormous successes with Turgenev, Chekhov, Ibsen and, very recently, with Schiller’s Don Carlos and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales . The Father premieres at Chichester in September 2006 with a no-doubt-starry cast yet to be announced.