About the work
Chamber play by August Strindberg, written in 1907 and first performed on 21 January 1908 at the Intima teatern in Stockholm, a theatre he had co-founded. Strindberg deliberately transposed the form of the musical sonata onto the structure of the play; the Swedish premiere flopped, and it was Otto Falckenberg's 1915 Munich production and Max Reinhardt's 1916 Berlin staging that finally brought the play its breakthrough.
Plot
A young student becomes a guest in an old house whose residents are trapped like ghosts in their own lies: a domineering old man in a wheelchair, a mummy-like woman who lives in a closet, and the ailing daughter of the house, with whom the student falls in love. As the household's respectable facade crumbles, it becomes clear that the young couple's love offers no way out either: the daughter dies, leaving the student alone.
Cultural significance
By dissolving the boundary between dream and reality, "The Ghost Sonata" is regarded as a forerunner of European Expressionist and absurdist theatre. Despite its failure at the premiere, it now ranks among Strindberg's most frequently staged late works and remains available to German-language theatres through stage-rights agencies such as Kiepenheuer Medien.