A Dream Play

Peacock Theatre, Dublin Previews Aug 23-24 €15-€18 Opens Aug 25-28 €12-€25 8pm (Sat mat 2.30pm) 01-8787222 abbeytheatre.ie

A year after Sigmund Freud suggested that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious (and long before Christopher Nolan imagined dreams as ever-deepening layers of chase scenes and Escher effects), the Swedish trailblazer August Strindberg was having troubled dreams of his own.

At the time, Strindberg’s mind was in chaos following the desertion of his wife, and he described the resulting play as “the child of my greatest pain”. That may account for its baleful progression, as Agnes – daughter of the god Indra – descends to Earth to discover a catalogue of woes among a myriad of characters in wildly disjointed locations. It is not exactly a lucid dream.

Perhaps that's why A Dream Playhas endeared itself to adventurous directors, particularly those renowned for broad imaginations: Antonin Artaud, Robert Wilson, Robert LePage and Katie Mitchell have all taken on this prototype of theatrical expressionism. Now Jimmy Fay stages Caryl Churchill's slimmed-down version of the play with the National Youth Theatre, where the roiling dreamscape is embedded in the consciousness of a broken-down 1950s banker.

How a cast of 16 teenagers respond to these folds of unconscious is anyone’s guess. But Strindberg, like a dream itself, has always been a friend to daring interpretation and racing minds.

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