SOURCE: Walsh, Paul. “Textual Clues to Performance Strategies in The Pelican.” In Strindberg's Dramaturgy, edited by Göran Stockenström, pp. 330-41. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Walsh remarks on the mixture of dramatic styles Strindberg used in The Pelican.

Despite its popularity in Scandinavia, The Pelican has been performed only rarely in the United States, and it has not attracted the kind of close critical attention given Strindberg's better known works. At first glance, the dramaturgical innovations in The Pelican strike one as slight compared, for example, with those in The Ghost Sonata, and the tone and tenor of the language, the catalog of mundane concerns, and the tangled skein of domestic relationships seem to reduce the play to a pathological melodrama about an unfortunately peculiar family. This was the reaction of the Stockholm critics to the premiere performance of The Pelican at...