(Mark Lawson’s Review appeared in the Guardian, 9/14/25; Photo: The Guardian.)
Orange Tree theatre, London
Director Tom Littler finds the comedy in the Swedish tragedian’s play about how people use each other up in love and art
In an interview before his production of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, the director Michael Blakemore reported telling the cast to aim for “Strindberg with laughs”. The line suggests a gulf between the Swedish dark tragedian and English light comedian but the dramatists have a curious affinity.
August Strindberg’s Creditors (1889) and Coward’s Private Lives (1930) both start in hotels where a troubled couple is haunted by a former marriage. It’s unclear if the influence was conscious but, if so, would have been apposite. Strindberg identified his drama as a “tragicomedy”, the genre in which, as Blakemore recognised, Coward is increasingly seen to belong.
This revival by Tom Littler (an accomplished Coward and Strindberg director) finds both the gasps and guffaws in Creditors, through a darkly sardonic version (from a literal translation by Agnes Broomé) by Howard Brenton, himself a tragicomic playwright, whose superb Churchill in Moscow was recently directed by Littler at this cramped but dynamic Orange Tree theatre.
Adolf, a twitchy artist exhibiting signs of physical and mental illness, is working on a clay model of a naked woman in the hotel parlour when interrupted by Gustaf, a fellow guest who has become a rather coercive mentor, having, through a fierce critique, turned Adolf from painting to sculpture. Gustaf also encourages the other man to talk about his wife, Tekla, a novelist who wrote a book fictionalising her “idiot” ex-husband and has taken a holiday from the holiday after a row over her alleged flirtations. She will soon return and Gustaf coaches Adolf in what to do and say. We sense that, as smoothly and ruthlessly as the Marquise in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Gustaf is setting traps and, by the time Tekla comes in, suspect Gustaf’s identity and mission.
