Master Olof

Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish dramatist, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter. During his four-decade career, Strindberg created more than sixty plays and over thirty books of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics, frequently drawing directly on his own experiences. He was a daring innovator and iconoclast who experimented with a variety of dramatic methods and objectives, including naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, as well as his foreshadowing of expressionist and surrealist theatrical tactics. Strindberg pioneered new approaches to dramatic action, vocabulary, and visual composition beginning with his early work. In 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof; it was not until 1881, at the age of thirty-two, that its premiere at the New Theatre provided him with his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that - building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play - responded to Emile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established Théâtre Libre (opened 1887).