It is no exaggeration to say that O Pai (The Father, 1887) is one of August Strindberg’s most ferocious plays. A seismic shock in three acts, which continues to shake the walls of the bourgeois family’s living room to their very foundations. In a traditional household, the father, the Captain, and the mother, Laura, are in open conflict over the upbringing of their daughter, Berta. “It’s like being locked in a cage of tigers.” When the Captain tries to impose his will, Laura retaliates by planting the seed of doubt in her husband’s fevered imagination: is he, in fact, Berta’s father? This uncertainty plunges the Captain into a devastating nightmare of paranoia, hallucination and even madness. The Father brings to the stage several of the themes dear to Strindberg, not without a hint of misogyny: the author viewed relationships between men and women as a ‘life-and-death struggle for power’. With this play, we return to the work of the playwright of the ‘vast expanses of the inner self’ and to the staging by Gonçalo Waddington.

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