It’s fair to say that August Strindberg has a bit of an image problem. A prolific and versatile writer – he didn’t just write plays, but novels, polemical tracts, autobiography, journalism – he’s known in Britain for a handful of spiky plays (including Miss Julie, The Father, and The Dance of Death) which have a habit of ending with someone either going mad or killing themselves. The articulate venom his characters employ in poisoning each others’ lives makes Ibsen look, frankly, Scandinavian lite – and indeed there was no love lost between the two dramatists (Ibsen hung a brooding portrait of Strindberg above his desk and wrote: “He is my mortal enemy, and shall hang there and watch while I write”). (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/biographyandmemoirreviews/9146637/Strindberg-A-Life-by-Sue-Prideaux-review.html)