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Shows Worth Seeing:
Creditors
By August Strindberg
BAM Harvey Theatre
651 Fulton St., Brooklyn
Box office: (718) 636-4100
This Donmar Warehouse production of Strindberg’s
play Creditors (1888), directed by Alan Rickman, is the
most intense and rewarding 90 minutes I’ve spent in a theater
this year. Superbly adapted by the playwright David Greig, who
smoothly contemporized the stiff 19th-century speech without relinquishing
the period setting, the play is so swift and smart, and it builds
to such a ferocious climax, that my chest felt like a drum-skin
at the curtain call. Creditors is an early realistic
work with titanic battle-of-the-sexes overtones in the vein of
the better known The Father, but it is to my mind a better
and more enduring play because it’s fairer to both sides
of the battle. Both the principal Man and the principal Woman
are allowed to be strong and wholly plausible here, and though
the Man ostensibly triumphs in the end (at the expense of a third
character, a mere mortal male, the Woman’s second husband),
there’s no triumphalism or whining about unfairness. The
horrible action--the deliberate, vindictive and almost clinically
efficient destruction of a marriage--is presented as a fantastically
unpleasant truth about the cosmos that we are all exhorted to
recognize or deny at our peril. I doubt that anyone who wasn’t
already prompted to think about misogyny in Strindberg would consider
that word any more applicable to him than misandry (or misanthropy)
on the sole evidence of this carefully balanced production.
Rickman and his British cast (Tom Burke,
Anna Chancellor and Owen Teale) must be congratulated for infusing
this work with so much light, life and gripping momentum. No production
I’ve seen has made clearer why Strindberg was a born playwright,
someone for whom human beings, with their incessant displays of
cruelty, bad faith and selfishness, chiefly existed as grist for
dramas. This author mined his experience, public and private,
for the “strong and cruel struggles” he felt uniquely
equipped to depict, and he often provoked those struggles with
his behavior--his equally mad and maddening blend of exaggerated
self-pity, scalding temper and paranoia. The three characters
in Creditors may seem exaggerated at times, even paranoically
calculating, but they never seem unreal because they were so plainly
real for Strindberg. He saw them as strictly true to nature, which
is why their astonishingly extreme arguments all make perfect
logical sense. That's part of what's so disturbing about them.
How extraordinary that such a crackpot play about a marriage from
122 years ago can still delight and crackle with this much energy,
intelligence and grisly fun.
