and because a dream is usually painful rather than pleasant, a tone of melancholy and compassion for all living creatures permeates the rambling narrative.The play itself doesn't center around a single well-defined individual, but rather simply follows someone who seems to be a combination of different professional men, all confused. The feminine foil to these men is Indra's Daughter, a Christ-like figure. She was played in the original production by Harriet Bosse, Strindberg's ex-wife.:59 Psychology of the author Strindberg wrote it following a near-psychotic episode. During that time, he came to be extremely disturbed, thinking witches were attempting to murder him. He later wrote a memoir about this period of his life. Eventually, though, he recovered, thanks to his mother-in-law. Previously, Strindberg had seen himself as a martyr, constantly persecuted by women. This affected his view of the overall relationship between the sexes, and of course his writing. He finally realized that he was playing a part in his failed relationships after his third marriage to Bosse collapsed. Bosse was behind the main character of A Dream Play. The play, called by Strindberg "the child of my greatest pain," reflects the author's observation that life is an illusion, similar to a dream. Notable productions The world premiere of A Dream Play was performed at The Swedish Theatre in April 1907, six years after it was written. Harriet Bosse, Strindberg's third wife (divorced by this time) played Indra's daughter. Victor Castegren directed the production and Carl Grabow was the designer. Critics at the time noted that the demands of the play made it nearly impossible to mount a satisfactory production. Strindberg himself desired to re-stage it in his Intimate Theatre, but ultimately it was not successful. Max Reinhardt directed one of the most influential versions of the play. First staged in 1921 at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm,:38 later that year he mounted a more famous production at Berlin's Deutsches Theater. The play afterward attracted some of the 20th century's most celebrated directors, including , Olof Molander, Antonin Artaud, Ingmar Bergman, Roger Blin, Robert Wilson, Mike Dempsey, Robert Lepage and Alejandro Jodorowsky. The German director Knut Ström staged A Dream Play in Düsseldorf in 1918, co-directed with Paul Henkels. Ingmar Bergman staged the play three times, filming the first production for TV in 1963. At the end of Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander (1982), Emilie Ekdahl, the new manager of the