Review: The Creditors at Musgrove Studio, Maidment Theatre

August Strindberg's eccentric and radically individualistic art defies categorisation. Photo / Supplied

Ford Transit Productions should be applauded for daring to hope that audiences would want to see a little known work written towards the end of the 19th century by the obscure and enigmatic Swedish writer August Strindberg.

Those willing to take the chance will be rewarded with 90 minutes of hauntingly intense psychological warfare, jam-packed with stimulating ideas and punctuated by moments of wickedly gleeful humour.

Strindberg's eccentric and radically individualistic art defies categorisation. He seems to have devoured all the major currents of modern thought - from socialism through to Christian mysticism - and spewed out stridently controversial works that swing wildly between nihilistic despair and passionate commitment.

In The Creditors, the story is concentrated within an obsessive and destructive love triangle that allows Strindberg to reflect on marriage, betrayal, revenge, forgiveness, free will and the impossibility of ever really knowing another person. The play has been described as hopelessly misogynist and it certainly gives voice to some of the most scandalously deranged attacks on womanhood likely to be heard in our politically correct times.

But these diatribes seem designed as a warning against the self-consuming bitterness that arises out of disillusionment, and the play delivers a compelling critique of the mercantile state of mind in which the free gifts of unconditional love are reduced to an accumulation of credits and debts.

The subtlety and complexity of Strindberg's writing places extraordinary demands on the actors, and the superb cast rise to the challenge.

Michael Lawrence takes on a cunning, treacherous character who assumes a mask of friendship in order to destroy his former lover. In a wonderfully nuanced performance, Lawrence walks a tightrope between malicious duplicity and earnest sincerity before lighting a slow-burning fuse that reveals his diabolical lust for revenge.

Keith Adams' striking natural performance builds a deeply sympathetic portrait of a nervously overstrung artist whose morbidly sensitive temperament cannot contain the seething chaos of emotions that swell up as his marriage unravels.

The triangle is powerfully closed by Jennifer Ward - Lealand's mercurial performance as the alluring and infuriating Tekla - a restless, volatile woman who flits between frivolous vanity, steely determination and moments of selfless compassion.