Review: Creditors

Assessing Tom Littler’s new production of Strindberg’s bleak portrayal of coercive control is challenging.

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OUR VERDICT

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Ellie Kurtz

For star wattage alone it would certainly merit five stars, reuniting Jewel in the Crown actors Charles Dance, Gerladine James and Nicholas Farrell to superb effect, but of course this isn’t solely enough to grip.

When Strindberg wrote this excoriating drama in 1888 (just months apart from Miss Julie) he was in the midst of prolonged marital breakdown, living in surreal circumstances, and his pain and anger seeps through the play, its inherent misogyny and distrust of romantic relationships hard to stomach in Howard Brenton’s adaptation.

Set at a waterside hotel in Sweden, beautifully conjured by Louie Whitemore’s gorgeous blue and white design, the drama revolves around three people, a former artist (now sculptor) Adolf, his wife Tekla (initially absent) and the shadowy figure of Gustaf, a new friend of Adolf’s.

As the play opens Gustaf is clearly manipulating the rather hapless Adolf, persuading him of his absent wife’s faithlessness and encouraging him to berate her whilst he himself hides behind a door and listens to their heated exchange.

There are plaintive Shakespearean echoes here, both of Iago’s poisonous suggestions to Othello plus Polonius’ fateful hiding in Hamlet. 

Exploring a post-Darwninian world where all moral certainties have been upended, you can certainly see why Strindberg called himself a ‘ vivisector ’ as his play mercilessly explores the complicated, often embattled psychology of relationships.

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Ellie Kurtz

In the dramatist’s jaundiced view everything between a man and a woman seems subject to a shifting balance of credit and debt. Creditors and Miss Julie were called ‘battles of the brain plays,’ each exploring the coercive effect of one powerful mind upon another. 

The Orange Tree is a perfect setting for such an intimate, intense drama that runs straight through without interval (as Strindberg preferred), such a staging enhancing the inherent claustrophobia.

Whitemore’s elegant set is exquisite, the perfect foil for the ensuing psychodrama and the coastal world beyond the room well evoked.

Dance is ideal as the Machiavellian Gustaf who’s not quite what he seems, Farrell excellent as the all too suggestible painter and James is warmly persuasive as exuberant Tekla.

Director Tom Littler has done wonders in attracting such acting calibre to the Orange Tree and certainly the place has rightly become a theatrical magnet in recent years, but Creditors, whilst punchily staged and well performed, feels rather emotionally hollow.

Whilst inevitably one enjoys seeing such a trio of such accomplished actors in the round there’s scant intrinsic satisfaction to be derived; one wants to care about the characters but it’s difficult to fully engage with them amidst the rather overblown toxicity of the surrounding drama.