From the Director: Francesca Amendolia’s Perspective on August Strindberg’s The Stronger
By Francesca Amendolia, Director of The Stronger in Gamut Theatre’s 2 by Strindberg: The Stronger & The Outcast
August Strindberg’s two-character play The Stronger (1889) completely fails the Bechdel test.
The Bechdel test is a way to evaluate the representation of women in film, television, and theatre by looking for three simple things: (1) two named female characters (2) who talk to each other (3) about something other than a man.
There are two female characters in The Stronger, but neither is named—the script denotes them simply as Madame X and Mademoiselle Y (that is, one married woman, one unmarried). Only Madame X speaks, and her conversation centers around her husband and what relationship he might (or might not) have had with Mademoiselle Y. In addition, the stage directions establish that the two women are in a female-only space—a woman’s café—and yet the most dominant presence in the play is the absent male, the fulcrum of their connection and competition. The play seems to put the two women against each other in a duel to see who is the stronger.
In short, it’s not an immediately appealing play to a feminist director.
As I read and reread the play, however, it became increasingly clear there was another story happening here, something that went beyond the silencing of the unmarried woman and the brittle insecurity of the married one. Something personal rather than universal, despite the apparent anonymity of X and Y. Something that connected the two women far more fiercely than it divided them. The married character might extol the virtues of home, husband, and family, but she also plainly longs for her friend. She is in turns accusatory and defensive, smug and vulnerable, patronizing and needy. She describes the intense influence her friend has had on her (“I wear your colors, read your authors, eat your favorite dishes, drink your drinks…”) and even thanks her for teaching her how to love. Interesting.
Strindberg wrote the role of Madame X for his soon-to-be-ex-wife, actor Siri Von Essen. At that time, their marriage was already in trouble, not least because Strindberg was convinced (not incorrectly) that Von Essen was having an affair with her friend Nathalia Larsen, a Danish actor. That sense of betrayal might have been provocation enough for The Stronger, but Strindberg had deeply conflicting feelings about women in general. He was clearly attracted to talented, independent, strong-minded women—he married three of them. Equally clearly, he could not live with these talented, independent, strong-minded women—he also divorced all three. He wrote a collection of stories (Getting Married) with such empowered female characters that he was prosecuted for blasphemy. He was also convinced that there was a secret European female conspiracy to silence him (and even wrote a book—The Defense of a Fool—intended to preempt those attacks).
With The Stronger, whether he intended to or not, Strindberg wrote a play that tapped directly into his anxiety about being sidelined (personally and sexually). He attempted to insert himself into the women’s space, their conversation, their relationship, and even so, the story I see unfold is less about the absent male and more about the choices women face in a society that rewards them for heterosexual compliance. The two women meeting in this café might easily be Von Essen and Larsen, lovers who make very different decisions about how to live their lives but who both realize that no decision is without its price. In the end, it matters less whether one of them is stronger than the other, but whether they can both be stronger than the limitations they face and the roles they have been assigned.