David Greig: ‘I had to somehow become Strindberg’

About 10 years ago, when YouTube was still new, the playwright David Greig was exploring video clips on that website. He happened upon a recording of a performance staged by a theatre company in Slovenia that had "an uncanny familiarity". He realised that the group was performing his play Pyrenees, a mystery about identity in which an amnesiac man is discovered in the snow-covered mountains. The play seemed to have undergone its own fascinating transformation.

“On one hand it was the play that I knew, but on the other hand it just wasn’t. It was utterly foreign.” That is often the way with Greig, one of Scotland’s greatest writers, whose peripatetic upbringing has left him with a refined English accent. (“People carry a landscape in their voice,” says one of his characters, like a private joke.)

But back to the play. “There was this point where the audience laughed at a joke, and I knew what joke it was. And I was just knocked back to think that this thing I’d written had created a physical reaction in an audience a thousand miles away. I was both thrilled and dizzied by it.”

As the Dublin group C Company prepares to stage his adaptation of August Strindberg's Creditors, Greig hopes his translation will pay the Swedish author the same courtesy.

Recurring themes

Dislocation and connection are recurring themes in Greig’s expansive body of work. “I think there’s a deep underlying thing in all of the work I’ve done, which is an attempt to look at ‘an other’ and to find that, actually, there isn’t; that we are them and they are us.”

Finding a common theme within such work is no small order. Greig has written more than 30 plays, measured out in Brechtian works, naturalistic dramas, experimental theatre, physical theatre, translations, adaptations, children’s theatre and musicals, easily making him Scotland’s most prolific and successful playwright.

His rapturously received, slyly political adaptation of Dr Seuss's The Lorax has just finished in London; his work on a multi-authored second World War drama, Andre Verdskrigen – Natt I Verda, will open next month at Oslo's Det Norske Teatret (performed in Norwegian); his new adaptation of Strindberg's The Father will open in April in Brooklyn; and, in the same month, he officially begins as the new artistic director of the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, where he lives.

An Irish triumph

In Ireland, audiences might have recently seen his extraordinarily moving play

The Events

at the

Dublin Theatre Festival

, inspired by the

Anders Behring Breivik

massacre in Norway, or his utterly delightful verse comedy

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart

at Galway International Arts Festival, or his charming two-hander between bruised Scottish souls,

Being Norwegian

at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre in Dublin. Even if they saw all three, they might still have no fixed sense of Greig. That may be because Greig – who was born in Edinburgh, brought up in Nigeria, and studied in Bristol – has no fixed sense of himself. He has spoken before of “a powerful compulsive desire to be rooted and a powerful awareness that I’m not”.

The latest example of Greig's work, his 2008 version of Strindberg's outrageously provocative play Creditors, is unlikely to narrow down any perceptions. How much of Greig is there in it?

Characteristically, he offers two analogies; one from low culture, one from high culture. "The first is that it's like a Vulcan mind meld," he chuckles. "In this case I had to somehow become Strindberg, so that when I'm typing, it feels no different than writing a new play. But then this is probably where I come to the other analogy, which is from [Jorge Luis] Borges, who wrote a story about a man who rewrote Don Quixote [Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote], but he didn't rewrite it by copying it, he rewrote it by recreating his life to such an extent that when he sat down to write, what inevitably came out would be Don Quixote."

When Greig finds the necessary affinity to let his own writing flow, he feels that he is “connected to [Strindberg] . . . You start to get to a point where, if it’s working, it feels like it’s inevitable what the next line should be. And then you look over and you go, ‘Oh, that’s what Strindberg wrote as well.’ I must admit that the person who it’s best and easiest to do that with is Strindberg.”

Not everyone might claim such easy kinship with Strindberg, one of the most formally adventurous, provocative and unquestionably troubled artists of the 19th century. It's often difficult to disentangle Strindberg's sexual politics – and sometimes his mental health – from his work. In The Father, for instance, a wife intentionally drives her husband insane in order to gain control of their daughter.

In Creditors, marriage is portrayed as a vampiric relationship, in which an artist who has seduced a woman away from her first husband is brought to believe – by a Machiavellian interloper – that she has drained away his own potency.

Personal flaws

It’s hard to come away from Greig’s version of this tragicomedy without guffawing at its rancorous vision of male hysteria. It was originally staged by the Donmar Warehouse, where it was directed by the late

Alan Rickman

, and it is an enjoyably nasty piece of work.

“I don’t doubt that Strindberg personally held views which we would regard as misogynist,” Greig says, evenly. “But what I would say is that Strindberg made plays. His personal flaws and failings are of no relevance, in a sense. And in the play, the first thing I observe is that Strindberg is the best exposer of male sexual failings, flaws and fears that I’ve ever come across. The reason for that is that there is no barrier. He’s got no sense of preserving his own reputation or dignity,” Greig says, laughing.

Although Greig says he has intervened whenever Strindberg puts “straightforward sexist projections” in his female character’s mouth, the original play’s threatened and near demonic vision of marriage otherwise allows for “wrestling matches” between opponents of equal power, “particularly between men and women, which are just brutal and compelling. You feel you have a ringside seat to a fight to the death. It’s really extraordinary.”

Greig might be a wildly successful playwright, but he is not a wild one; his original plays are shaped and structured, often warm and certainly wry. His attraction to the energy of a writer as unhinged as Strindberg might be precisely because Greig is himself so well hinged.

Early in Greig’s career, reviewers liked to point out that he explored people’s failure to connect. “I used to think, No, I really don’t. I do the opposite of that. I explore the really brilliant, magnificent fact that very, very occasionally humans do connect. But I start from the view that that is a rare and amazing thing.”

His connection with Strindberg is something similar, a mind melding across centuries, language and culture to recognise an enduring raw truth in such unrestrained theatre. If Strindberg happened upon a YouTube link to Greig’s distant version, he would recognise the energy of his creation. Pondering the “physical effect” of Strindberg’s formal and political provocations, Greig might feel the same. “You think, yeah, you’ve got it,” he approves. “You know me, Strindberg.”

Creditors is at the New Theatre, Dublin, January 25th to February 6th