Review: 'Creditors' by August Strindberg

By independent URY reviewer, James Metcalf.

Perhaps August Strindberg is an unfamiliar name to most; I had certainly never heard of him, but the radio play of his creation ‘Creditors’, which will feature on University Radio York on Sunday 25th November, from 14:00 until 15:25 in the afternoon, changed all that.

Advertised as a ‘darkly comic and mature work of obsession, honour, and revenge’, ‘Creditors’ deals with the mania of a married artist named Adolph who waits impatiently for his ambitious and fiercely independent novelist wife to return. When he discovers that he is, in fact, suffering as a result of his anxiety and passionate yet resentful covetousness, he opens his life to a stranger, and finds that he has more suffering still to endure. This stranger uncovers the possibilities of infidelity, and future unhappiness, and Adolph is forced to confront these issues that had, unconsciously, already infiltrated his interior mind. In so doing, he questions his future with a woman whose heart is withheld and whose feelings are consequently unknown, and finds that the happiness he thought he had was never truly there at all – at least, not as he remembers it.

Of course, a play such as this focuses on the familiar themes of male and female relations, rife with sexual and social domination, the complexities of human emotion, and the hidden, ulterior agendas of all those involved. Still, the student play, directed by Lewis Gray and based on David Greig’s 2008 version which premièred at London’s Donmar Warehouse, casts a new light onto this dark subject matter; a light that is filled with both the reflective surface of wry comedy, and the shadow of tragedy that claws at the whole of human life.

Gray’s adaptation of Strindberg’s ‘Creditors’ for radio stars Ryan Lane, Dan Wood, and Georgia Bird – all of whom are eminently professional and extraordinarily engaging. The combination of these student voice actors with a script so full of the clefts and peaks of individual experience transforms what could have been a dry recital of a piece of theatre free of modern relevance, into an intriguing and thoroughly appropriate play, full of fine acting, carefully honed direction, and, of course, the written word of a Swedish master of the tragicomedy.

Though the prose may be as full of metaphor and surreptitious magnificence as one would expect of the age in which it was written, and though the characters are a relativly unknown in today’s age of pragmatic professionalism, the driving motif is the same – that when men are together, their wives become the topic of questionable conversation, that marriage is continually answerable to the subjective speculation of self-conscious voyeurs, and that hidden lives are, in fact, ever surprising and hardly ever what one expects.

The Festival of Drama currently taking place on University Radio York renovates an already innovative radio station, and this is epitomised whole-heartedly by ‘Creditors’. The quick wit of the writing is complemented by the evenly matched vocal nuances of Lane, Wood, and Bird, and the dexterous direction of Gray which hides the themes just long enough to keep the listener wrapt with unavoidable attention. This play is deceptively simple, both in its acting and production. The challenge of tempering human tragedy with barbed comedy is carried off so well and so professionally that one believes anyone could do it. Perhaps this is its greatest triumph; it is neither overbearing nor overtly difficult to comprehend, it is purely enjoyable radio drama at its best.

'Creditors' will be broadcast on Sunday the 25th of November at 14:00. See our facebook event for more details.