A Dream Play - by August Strindberg (Paperback)

About the Book

A woman comes from another world to see if life is as difficult as people make it out to be.

Book Synopsis

In Strindberg's A Dream Play, written in 1901, characters merge into each other, locations change in an instant and a locked door becomes an obsessively recurrent image. As Strindberg himself wrote in his Preface, he wanted "to imitate the disjointed yet seemingly logical shape of a dream. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist."

Caryl Churchill's spare and resonant new version was first staged at the National Theatre, London, in a production by Katie Mitchell, where A Dream Play was called "fresh, new and magical" (Telegraph).

Caryl Churchill has written for the stage, television and radio. A renowned and prolific playwright, her plays include Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Bliss, Love and Information, Mad Forest and A Number. In 2002, she received the Obie Lifetime Achievement Award and 2010, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a novelist and playwright from Stockholm, Sweden. His plays include Miss Julie, The Father, To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Pelican. In 1912 Strindberg's birthday was marked by a torchlight procession through Stockholm, where his radical journalism had earned him the title of 'people's writer.'

Review Quotes

"Fresh, new and magical." -- Charles Spencer, The Telegraph


"Fresh, new and magical." -- Charles Spencer, The Telegraph

About the Author

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). Caryl Churchill (1938-) is probably the most respected woman dramatist in the English-speaking world. She is the author of some twenty plays including Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Serious Money, The Skriker, Blue Heart, Far Away and A Number, seen and admired all over the world.