" Through this angst of the world Strindberg attacks anything conventional. He impatiently rejects nineteenth-century notions of the fixed dramatic characters acting according to their types. Strindberg: "Since they are modern characters, living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age which preceded it, I have drawn my people as split and vacillating, a mixture of the old and the new.".
Strindberg's naturalism, his new realism about sexuality and class, spills over into expressionism, which plunges into the depths of the psyche. He created a series of dreamlike plays that point through symbolism toward expressionism, A Dream Play being the culmination of these plays and experimentation.
Expressionism, a movement lead by artists, most notably Van Gogh, on stage deliberately set out to change the rules which governed the way drama could be written, encoded and staged. Its aim was to express emotional experience, to make the wishes, fears, and obsessions of the human psyche both visible and audible. There is no one form of expressionism- it manifests itself in a variety of forms. These artists wanted to break away from a rational view of reality and tended to verbalize emotions rather than dramatize conflicts. Being led by the visual arts, expressionism in the theatre of course relied on the artistic visuals that theatre can present. The set designs incorporated vivid colour schemes and distorted architecture to create atmosphere. Strindberg used this reliance on the visual in A Dream Play through his extraordinary amounts of impossible stage direction involving morphing trees, growing castles and ships sailing across the stage.
The ideal of expressionism in theatre can be seen in the manifesto to the expressionist actor, which appears in May 1916 in Paul Kornfeld's "Epilogue to the Actor". In this work Kornfeld insisted that expressionist actors should not behave:.