A strange landscape. A tower rising up from a garden of flowers and growing larger as time goes by. A woman knitting a blanket of stars. A face peeking over a wall. Objects that change properties. Faces that separate, double, multiply, disappear, solidify, blur, and become distinct... Images from a child’s dream or a strange poetic tale full of eerie stories told by an aged person... Perhaps, in the end, it is only a theatrical dream, A Dream Play (1901), like that created by August Strindberg and presented at the National Theatre of Greece’s Main Stage in a production directed by Georgia Mavragani.

The Swedish playwright tells the story of Agnes, the daughter of a god, from the moment she descends from the heavens to learn about human nature and the experiences of this unknown species. The many and varied people she meets each share their own world with her, which Agnes sometimes enters as a spectator and sometimes as a participant. As she travels with them, she starts to become more and more human, experiencing for herself the difficulties of life, its hopes and disappointments.

A Dream Play, the author’s favourite and most personal work, is at the same time his most enigmatic. Having been instrumental in shaping the realist movement, in this play, Strindberg dives into a place of symbols and archetypal myth, presenting an irrational vision of the world, an interpretation of human experience beyond the laws of natural science. In this highly poetic drama, the playwright creates small islands of tangible reality which collapse as space is gradually abrogated, time expands, and the characters are merely different aspects of the same person, the person who dreams, the person who perpetually wonders why people suffer, why the world is made this way, and how one should live?

Georgia Mavragani, together with a dynamic creative team and actors from both the younger and the older generation, approaches the play as a choral narrative, a handcrafted piece of large-scale theatre. She listens to the unspoken laws of this strange universe, where nothing is as it seems, approaching it with sensitivity and lyricism. Through the bodies and voices of the actors, through speech and music, the director attempts to imitate the disjointed logic of dreams and fairy tales. Because in dreams, as on stage, anything can happen and anything is possible…