For four years in fin-de-siècle Paris, Europe’s most famous playwright vanished. Most people thought he had gone insane. When he reappeared, his new plays changed theatre forever. Abandoning theatre, living a life of squalid splendour, August Strindberg practises alchemy. In his hotel room, he attempts to make gold by finding the philosopher’s stone, the secret of creation. As his grasp of reality weakens his first two wives visit him to bring him to his senses. But their interventions spin out of control. And – are they really his wives at all?

Howard Brenton’s new play tells the astonishing story of playwright August Strindberg’s ‘Inferno’ period when he suffered a notorious breakdown in Paris in 1896.