Theatre
True Women
Sanna kvinnor
Anne Charlotte Leffler · 1883
Opening lines
Fru Bark
Berta lilla! Går du icke och lägger dig nu?
Little Berta! Aren't you going to bed now?
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from litteraturbanken.se
Synopsis
In the Bark family, money is the battlefield. The father, Pontus Bark, a gambler, seeks to lay his hands on the inheritance of his wife, Julie, and counts on her docility to give it up to him. Their younger daughter, Berta, who earns her living in an office beside the cashier Lundberg, has a deed of gift drawn up to stop her father from gambling away her mother's property. She never confronts him face to face: the whole struggle passes through the mother, caught between them, under the gaze of the elder daughter, Lissie, and her husband.
Context
The play was premiered at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm on 15 October 1883 and was published the same year by Hæggström. It reached the theatres of the Nordic capitals in the spring of 1884, was translated into Danish as early as 1884, was favourably received in Germany, then was translated into English in 1892 and performed in London in avant-garde circles. Swedish television made a television film of it in 1974, and a film appeared in 1991; a new English translation appears in the anthology Modern Drama by Women edited by Katherine E. Kelly in 1996.
Who it is for
A play in three acts, in Swedish; translated into English under the title True Women, it has never been translated into French.
Prizes and reception
The play that established its author's reputation, the most often performed of her works even today, and one of the few to have crossed borders.
Sources for this page 7
The pages consulted to check this page.