A Dream Play

In Strindberg’s A Dream Play, written in 1901, characters merge into each other, locations change in an instant and a locked door becomes an obsessively recurrent image. As Strindberg himself wrote in his Preface, he wanted “to imitate the disjointed yet seemingly logical shape of a dream. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist.”

Caryl Churchill’s spare and resonant new version was first staged at the National Theatre, London, in a production by Katie Mitchell, where A Dream Play was called “fresh, new and magical” (Telegraph).

Caryl Churchill has written for the stage, television and radio. A renowned and prolific playwright, her plays include Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Bliss, Love and Information, Mad Forest and A Number. In 2002, she received the Obie Lifetime Achievement Award and 2010, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a novelist and playwright from Stockholm, Sweden. His plays include Miss Julie, The Father, To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Pelican. In 1912 Strindberg's birthday was marked by a torchlight procession through Stockholm, where his radical journalism had earned him the title of ‘people’s writer.’