Pariah (play)

Strindberg’s theatre would present naturalistic plays, and the artistic director would be his wife, Siri von Essen.

Beset with disasters, not the least of which was the censorship of his play, Miss Julie, the theatre had a tumultuous and extremely brief history.

[1][2] In the audience at Malmö was Ola Hansson, who had just published a short story from which, Strindberg claimed in a program note, the title and theme of Pariah were taken.

A possible example of that influence, is that a scene of psychological detective work occurs in Poe’s short story, "The Gold Bug", that appears to have inspired an episode in Pariah.

[3] Important to Strindberg with this and other plays, such as Miss Julie and The Father, was his desire to achieve the ideals of Naturalism in drama as described and analyzed by the French author and theorist, Emile Zola — the nouvelle formule.

Strindberg modeled Pariah on the Les Quarts d’Heure (1888) plays of the French writers Gustave Guiches and Henri Lavedan, which, in his essay “On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre”, Strindberg describes as dramas reduced to a single scene.

[4] Pariah carries on, in a veiled manner, a debate that Strindberg had been having through postal correspondence with the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who in Götzen-Dämmerung, portrays a criminal as a strong person, who is just misdirected in life.