Marriage Pit

By T.E. Kalem

THE NIGHT OF THE TRIBADES by Per Olov Enquist

If anyone had asked August Strindberg for his definition of hell, he would have given an implacable and desolated one-word answer--women. Or perhaps, wives.

Strindberg was involved in three disastrous marriages that nearly broke his ever precarious hold on sanity. Only his ability to transmute his inner torment into dramatic art saved him. His is a classic case of what Edmund Wilson called "the wound and the bow." From the suppurating wound of his domestic life, as un-healing as was the eagle-torn liver of Prometheus, he gathered the strength to draw the bow of craft, passion and insight and to launch an arrow of dramatic significance that is still in flight more than half a century after his death.

It is merely one of the uncommon virtues of Swedish Playwright Per Olov Enquist's admirable and unfailingly perceptive play that he makes this point abundantly clear. Another virtue is that he shows all that was puny, punitive, fearful and self-absorbed in Strindberg's nature and at the same time draws an utterly convincing portrait of genius on fire.

Tribades, in Greek, means lesbians.

The play is not about lesbians, only about the dark, anguishing suspicion in Strindberg's mind that his wife may be one and may have betrayed him with one. In this play-outside-a-play Strindberg (Max von Sydow) is directing a brief one-acter of his own called The Stronger. The actual play that Strindberg wrote is a 15-minute monologue in which a voluble wife tests her husband's adamantly silent mistress.

In Enquist's version the mistress be comes a beer-swigging lesbian, Marie Caroline David (Eileen Atkins), and the wife, Siri von Essen-Strindberg (Bibi Andersson), proclaims her love for her to Strindberg's horror, anger, jealousy and despair. The lines, mean and many, are sulfurous fumes straight from the marriage pit. In much of Enquist's play, Strindberg spews vitriolic putdowns at both women. These speeches are used to indicate the large feminine component in Strindberg's nature of which he was fully aware and which he wished to exorcise through a bludgeoning masculinity. In one scene, Strindberg asserts his potency in a comically insecure way, descanting on the length and girth of his sexual member in inches--not in millimeters, oddly enough.

There is no insecurity in Max von Sydow. He gives a towering performance. In intensity, innate authority and mordant humor, this is acting in the thermodynamic range. Bibi Andersson is pallid by comparison, a picture-postcard beauty who recites her lines without the intent to lacerate--rather strange considering her snake-fanged delivery as a wife in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Eileen Atkins is in Von Sydow's league. She encases herself in a palpable shield of silence and then hurls her lines like javelins dead on the mark.

The Night of the Tribades is a play that stretches the mind, bares the nerves, challenges the ear, braces the imagination. Is that too good for Broadway? Possibly. Possibly not. -- T.E. Kalem

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