2012:2

The short pier running out into the Thames from the north Kent town of Gravesend was for many years home to a plaque marking one of the very few places in Britain ever visited by world-famous Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The plaque, removed during renovations, now languishes at the back of a crowded storeroom, but the man continues to fascinate and provoke us in equal measure, as this special issue shows. Charlotte Purkis has done fine detective work on the events of his 1949 centenary and his fan base at the time the plaque went up.

Translator Eivor Martinus, whose essay evokes a whole life coloured by her discovery of the playwright, reflects on why he never had the breakthrough here enjoyed by Ibsen or Chekhov. His unpredictability and lack of restraint, she has found, can unsettle both audiences and actors.

Strindberg’s acerbic observations on the power of the press in the extract from The New Kingdom, appearing in English for the first time, are vividly rendered by Peter Graves and have uncomfortable echoes in our own day. Graves is another of our outstanding translators who has spent a great deal of time in the company of Strindberg’s texts.

It bodes well for Strindberg’s future that this centenary year has generated various student productions and projects. We report, for example, on a mentoring scheme to produce new versions of some of the one-act plays and a Red Room project running at UCL throughout October. After a slightly slow start, there have been a good many new Strindberg productions around the UK this year, though few British directors have publicised their projects on the official centenary website strindberg2012.se. Our list makes interesting reading, even if it is not fully comprehensive.

Strindberg constantly wrote for the press alongside his other work and was also a prolific lifelong correspondent; we take a look at his highly personal and sometimes explosive articles and letters. His scientific experiments may have been of dubious value, but in the field of early photography at least, as we see in this issue, he did thought-provoking work with his ‘celestographs’. We also shed light on the inspiration for his very first drama, In Rome.

Who would have thought it? Strindberg is now big in the world of comic books, as the introduction to the extract from the graphic-novel version of Inferno reveals. A whole Paris exhibition on the subject was recently mounted in France.

This many-faceted writer is a worthy subject of SBRs first single-author issue for some years, rounded off with our usual broad range of reviews.