Plays by August Strindberg: Creditors and Pariah

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This pair of short plays — Creditors (1888) and Pariah (1889) — represents Strindberg's naturalist period at its most compressed. Creditors is one of his most structurally perfect works: a triangle in which a man systematically destroys his wife's current husband by exploiting her guilt about her first marriage — only the final scene reveals the destroyer's identity. Pariah is a two-hander about psychological domination between a painter and a geologist who discover dark secrets about each other. Both demonstrate Strindberg's particular gift for plays in which every conversation is a power struggle.