“Post Inferno - To Damascus” by August Strindberg

The son of a maid, with three marriages, two divorces, five children, long-term economic and psychological problems and a series of nervous breakdowns to his name, he died of stomach cancer at the age of 63. Behold August Strindberg (1849–1912) the man, stripped of the febrile magnificence of the playwright who spoke about his fellow men like no one had done before.

The protagonist of the “To Damascus” trilogy (1898–1900) is a man with no name, a Stranger and an alter ego for Strindberg himself. A man who loves women but a misogynist with it, the Stranger seduces a random female, the Lady. Sometimes with her and sometimes alone, he makes his way to the furthest reaches of the dream and of reality, of transcendentalism and realism, of Christianity and mysticism, of madness and logic, of the subconscious and conscious mind, of alchemy and science, guilt and freedom, of sin and becoming one with God, of sadomasochism and love. He bathes in sulphur springs and crosses untrodden mountain peaks, is locked up in monasteries and asylums on his own request, makes gold and begets children, seeks out Faith but Temptation, too, suffers at one and the same time from delusions of grandeur and an inferiority complex. The money is never enough, the family he wanted so much turns out to be a “den of lions and a nest of vipers” and out of happiness—short-lived, always—disaster is borne.

Unconventional and contradictory by nature, Roula Pateraki, the experimental director who has never hesitated to take on a major spectacle, the philosopher of the stage who has directed the stars of her era, presents for her first collaboration with the Onassis Stegi the Greek première of Strindberg’s epic trilogy with its agonized theological, existential, conjugal and erotic problematics. As she puts it: “I take Strindberg on through my understanding of the present, as far as the times, my competence and my love for him as a playwright allow”.