The Father - Softcover

August Strindberg (1849-1912) is best-known for his misogyny and as the author of Miss Julie (1889). His first success came as a novelist and autobiographer. His plays (and he wrote over sixty) were deeply controversial in their time and still are to some extent. They range form bold naturalism (e.g. The father, 1887) to an entralling expressionism (e.g. The Ghost Sonata, 1907).

THE FATHER still has the power to astonish. Richard Nelson's new adaptation of the Swedish text speaks in clean, spare English prose, the kind that remains discreetly outside time without betraying the conventions of the period when the play was written (1887).... It's not exactly news to report that THE FATHER is an extraordinary play. The news is that its ability to shock remains undiminished as, in the course of twenty-four hours, the increasingly chilly, twenty-year marriage of the Captain and the willful Laura escalates into a war to the death. We are deep in territory that Ingmar Bergman would later explore, though never with quite such harrowing results. ...Mr Nelson's excellent adaptation. --Vincent Canby, The New York Times