A Dream Play

"A Dream Play" was perhaps the first drama to employ a dream-like reality as a genre-in-itself. By doing this, Strindberg abandoned conventional perceptions of time and space. He reduced his original theme, of the man waiting vainly at the theatre for his fiancee who never comes, to a subplot; his chief character now was Indra's Daughter, the child of a god who is sent by her father to live among mortals. She meets and marries a poor man's lawyer, who spends his life vainly trying to right the wrongs of humanity; so she endures the agonies of human existence until, at last, she puts off her mortal flesh and returns to her father.