Old Play in Manhattan

The Father (by August Strindberg; English version by Robert L. Joseph; produced by Richard W. Krakeur & Mr. Joseph, in association with Harry Brandt) is one of the most vitriolic plays ever written. A man who suffered from, quarreled with and hated women because he loved them, who felt perpetually persecuted and all but went mad, Swedish Playwright Strindberg wrote The Father as a testimonial to his first marriage. Conceived in loathing and dedicated to the proposition that all women are created evil, The Father, first produced in 1887, inspired a new theatrical naturalism.

The play tells of a Swedish cavalry captain whose ruthless wife--in a deep sexual struggle for domination--malignly and methodically drives him insane. Her final ruse is to obsess him with the idea that he is not the father of their child. Strindberg is himself obsessed here, seeing all villainy in the world's wives, as the mad Lear saw it in the world's daughters. But if an unbalanced man, Strindberg was a far from impotent artist: he punctuated the play with flashes of insight and jabs of feeling.

Today The Father, in addition to its pathological excesses, wears a period air. Yet on a watered-down Broadway, a play that is all scorch and bite is worth reviving. Unhappily, last week's revival was more in the nature of a coffin nail. It lacked skill, perception and tension: at its best it could only serve up gall and wormwood as a kind of sizzling platter. As the wife, Mady Christians did, at any rate, sizzle now & then. As the husband, Raymond Massey merely spouted, as if announcing all the terrible things that did not seem to be happening to him.

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