Following the logic of a dream, in which characters merge into each other, locations change in an instant and a locked door becomes an obsessively recurrent image, Strindberg's A Dream Play written in 1902 is an amazing amalgam of Freud, Alice's Wonderland and Strindberg's own private symbolism. As Strindberg himself said, he wanted "to capture the inconsistent yet ostensibly logical structure of a dream. Everything can happen...Time and Place do not exist." Caryl Churchill's spare and resonant new version will premiere at the National Theatre in repertoire from mid-February 2005, coinciding with the big Strindberg exhibition at Tate Modern.
