![]() ![]() ![]() ‘Eros is not the main theme’, explained Strindberg to Anna Flygare, who was to play Swanwhite, ‘the symbolism relates to Caritas, the great love which suffers everything, forgives, hopes, and believes, however much it is betrayed. A Dream Play, fantasy play in 14 scenes by August Strindberg, published in Swedish as Ett drmspel in 1902 and first produced in 1907. The elegance of the play’s structure and stagecraft goes far to guard against sentimentality. Its young lovers are hardly more than children indeed it is the resolution of the relationship between Swanwhite and the mother image, split between stepmother and guardian angel, which has to be achieved before her love of the Prince can be fulfilled. Unlike the realistically framed Blue Bird, it is not technically a dream play, but is set entirely in a fairytale palace (for which young Knut Ström designed a charming art nouveau set). This was one of his most popular plays, a fairytale piece, half-intended for children, like the earlier Lucky Peter’s Travels and The Keys of the Kingdom. ![]() In a third work, Swanwhite, he created an example of the same genre as Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird and its sequel, The Betrothal, but antedating them. In Strindberg’s A Dream Play, written in, characters merge into each other, locations change in an instant and a locked door becomes an obsessively recurrent image. Strindberg acknowledged Maeterlinck’s influence on his peasant play, The Crown Bride, and on A Dream Play. Like Strindberg’s other dream plays, which were inspired in part by Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and When We Dead Awaken, the play seems to announce the replacement of well.
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