Staggering out of the Brooklyn Academy of Music after seeing the Donmar Warehouse production of Creditors on Tuesday night, I was reminded what a difference committed, fearless artists can make. I dislike August Strindberg’s work, though I reluctantly acknowledge its seminal impact on the formation of modern theater. (I vastly prefer Chekhov and Ibsen, his fellow pioneers.) It’s hard to warm up to a playwright who hates women as much as Strindberg does, especially since that’s usually what he’s writing about. I am unpersuaded by the critics who argue that he’s not a misogynist because the men in his plays behave just as badly as women; in my view, Strindberg’s vicious men always turn out to be responding–perhaps just a bit excessively–to the egregiously unfeminine and destructive behavior of a woman. Creditors, like The Dance of Death, is a power struggle among three people in which one of the men is a pathetic victim, and the other one of those nasty but ultimately justified types I mentioned above. When I last saw Dance of Death, Helen Mirren did her damnedest to make Alice more than a man-eating monster, but she couldn’t really hide the fact that she knew Ian McKellen had a much better part, with the Captain getting moving soliloquies about aging and dying while Alice screeched and flirted with the hapless pawn in their battle. Walking out at the end, Joe and I shook our heads, saying, “Creepy, but not much of a play.”
Well, Creditors forced me to acknowledge Strindberg’s genius, if not his wholesomeness, as three remarkable actors stormed through this vile, riveting drama in 90 scarifying minutes. Probingly directed by Alan Rickman, Tom Burke (the pathetic victim), Owen Teale (the not-really-so-sinister older man) and Anna Chancellor (the monster-woman) made each repugnant generalization about human nature the product of their wonderfully specific personal neuroses. Burke’s character was so vulnerable and confiding that you winced as you watched Teale’s character breaking him down into a quivering lump of insecurity about the older, more intelligent and perhaps more talented woman he married. (He doesn’t yet know that his manipulator is her former husband.) Chancellor entered, after Teale had hidden, to find her husband refusing to play the games that had previously made them both happy, and if her persistence in calling Adolph by the infantilizing nickname “Little Brother” was distasteful, her matter-of-fact reply to his furious reproaches went a long way to neutralizing Strindberg’s (yes) misogyny. Maybe I’m wrong that the playwright intended us to sneer at Tekla’s assertions that she leads her own life and does as she pleases, she’s a writer first and foremost; certainly Chancellor made them persuasive. Once Burke tottered offstage and Teale re-entered for the final conflict, however, I felt again that Strindberg’s sympathies were always (and only) for the rejected first husband. Tekla seems quite glad to see Gustav, though nothing we’ve heard about her leaving him suggests that she would be, and almost flirtatious as she hopes they can be friends. When she realizes what’s going on and the real action begins, he has the upper hand throughout. Teale’s electrifying monologue (“Forgive me, for saving you from your mother. Forgive me for making a woman of you.” etc. etc.) makes him the most fully rounded, if not exactly sympathetic character in the play. When he opens the door to reveal that Adolph has been listening the whole time, it’s a horrifying moment, but I wasn’t overcome with grief for anyone–it seemed clear from the outset that this ghastly day could only end one way for these fucked-up people. Ben Brantley’s intelligent review in the NY Times claimed Creditors as “a template for a kind of take-no-prisoners drama that would flourish in the 20th century, practiced by writers as different as Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter”–true enough, though O’Neill at least seems to have some compassion for his subjects. David Mamet seems to me a more obvious heir to Strindberg, with his jaundiced view of the human race in general and women in particular, and I stopped going to Mamet’s plays years ago. With Strindberg, however, I can still be exhilarated by watching gifted artists throw themselves heart and soul into a play whose power I can’t deny, even if its underlying message repels me.
Urban Arts Lover 