The three plays in this volume focus on the tumultuous relationships between men and women, whether they are father and daughter, brother and sister or lovers. Miss Julie is a ruthlessly realistic depiction of an upper class woman's seduction of a servant, emphasizing the differences and the antagonism between them. In The Father a man is brought to madness and driven out of his home by the suspicion that his daughter is not his own child, while Easter centres on a family in need of redemption for its sins and suffering, finding forgiveness at a season of rebirth. Strindberg's acute psychological analysis and his dramatization of naked emotion within a naturalistic domestic setting make him one of the great innovators of the modern theatre.

Author Biography

August Strindberg, born in Stockholm in 1849, was the author of more than fifty plays, as well as novels, short stories, poems and an autobiography. Few of his earlier plays are remembered, but from the 1880s he began to write with great intensity. He died in 1912. Peter Watts also translated Ghosts and Other Plays for the Penguin Classics. He died in 1972.