Word: strindberg
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...when he won the 1951 Nobel Prize for literature, 60-year-old Pär Lagerkvist was little known outside his native Sweden. But at home he has long enjoyed a solid reputation. Thirty years ago, he was writing plays that reminded fellow Swedes of their countryman, August Strindberg. Since those days he has turned out a steady flow of poetry, drama, novels and short stories...
...over half a century, the Western theater has been dominated by the coldly paternal influence of the great Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg-social conscience and psychological drama. This dramatic realism swept the charming Victorian puppets off the stage and replaced them with disagreeable people; it produced excellent playwrights and at least one genius-Shaw. For the paper cutouts of Victorianism it substituted newspaper cutouts, transformed the stage into a lecture platform and the playwright into an amateur reporter, reformer and psychiatrist. The few English-speaking playwrights who attempted metrical dramas usually produced verse as feeble as Maxwell Anderson...
...Burning Bright" says nothing that has not been said by the Bible, Sidney Howard, and Strindberg, among others. The theme is hackneyed and superficially treated. In an attempt to write poetically, Steinbeck has written an incredible large number of three word sentences, embellished with lengthy metaphors. Whenever a good line turns up, it is immediately obscured by the flow of monosyllables. The result is neither realism nor poetry...
...Glaring Lack. What hobbled the season was less a lack of aspiration than (as the New York Times's Critic Brooks Atkinson and others noted) a glaring lack of creativeness. Broadway swam with revivals (Shakespeare, Shaw, Strindberg Peter Pan), with books made into plays (The Member of the Wedding, The Innocents, The Happy Time, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep) with plays and books made into musicals (Regina, Lost in the Stars, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'). Making its chairs out of sofas rather than building them outright, Broadway still scorned the idea that the play...
...American, struggled to outdo each other in making their characters and their audiences groan. As the work of French Playwright Jean Anouilh (Antigone), Cry of the Peacock proved the more surprising debacle. Anouilh's indictment of Love began as frivolously as Molnar and wound up as savagely as Strindberg. With notable help from the production, the play messed up every mood it attempted, and, despite brief glimpses of something better, proved dated, hollow, inept. Bitterly portraying how Love tricks the innocent, mocks the decadent, dooms the misshapen, tortures the mad, Cry was almost literally a cry; the author seemed...