In its entirety the play forms a Christmas sermon with a quaint blending of law and gospel. A prominent Swedish critic, Johan Mortensen, wrote: "Reading it, one almost gets the feeling that Strindberg, the dread revolutionist, has, of a sudden, changed into a nice village school-teacher, seated at his desk, with his rattan cane laid out in front of him. He has just been delivering a lesson in Christianity, and he has noticed that the attention of the children strayed and that they either failed to understand or did not care to take in the difficult matters he was dealing with. But they must be made to listen and understand. And so—with serious eyes, but with a sly smile playing around the corners of his mouth—he begins all over again, in that fairy-tale style which never grows old: 'Once upon a time!'"
In November, 1907, a young theatrical manager, August Falck, opened the Intimate Theatre at Stockholm. From the start Strindberg was closely connected with the venture, and soon the little theatre, with its tiny stage and its auditorium seating only one hundred and seventy-five persons, was turned wholly into a Strindberg stage, where some of the most interesting and daring theatrical experiments of our own day were made. With particular reference to the needs and limitations of this theatre, Strindberg wrote a series of "chamber plays," four of which were published in 1907—each one of them appearing separately in a paper-covered duodecimo volume.
The first of these plays to appear in book form—though not the first one to be staged—was "The Thunder-Storm," designated on the front cover as "Opus I." Two of the principal ideas underlying its construction were the abolition of intermissions—which, according to Strindberg, were put in chiefly for the benefit of the liquor traffic in the theatre café—and the reduction of the stage-setting to quickly inter-changeable backgrounds and a few stage-properties. Concerning the production of "The Thunder-Storm," at the Intimate Theatre, Strindberg wrote subsequently that, in their decorative effects, the first and last scenes were rather failures. But he held the lack of space wholly responsible for this failure. His conclusion was that the most difficult problem of the small theatre would be to give the illusion of distance required by a scene laid in the open—particularly in an open place surrounded or adjoined by buildings. Of the second act he wrote, on the other hand, that it proved a triumph of artistic simplification. The only furniture appearing on the stage consisted of a buffet, a piano, a dinner-table and a few chairs—that is, the pieces expressly mentioned in the text of the play. And yet the effect of the setting satisfied equally the demands of the eye and the reason.
"The Thunder-Storm" might be called a drama of old age—nay, the drama of man's inevitable descent through a series of resignations to the final dissolution. Its subject-matter is largely autobiographical, embodying the author's experiences in his third and last marriage, as seen in retrospect—the anticipatory conception appearing in "Swanwhite." However, justice to Miss Harriet Bosse, who was Mrs. Strindberg from 1901 to 1904, requires me to point out that echoes of the dramatist's second marriage also appear, especially in the references to the postmarital relationship.
"After the Fire" was published as "Opus II" of the chamber-plays, and staged ahead of "The Thunder-Storm." Its Swedish name is Brända Tomten, meaning literally "the burned-over site." This name has previously been rendered in English as "The Burned Lot" and "The Fire Ruins." Both these titles are awkward and ambiguous. The name I have now chosen embodies more closely the fundamental premise of the play.
The subject-matter is even more autobiographical than that of "The Thunder-Storm"—almost as much so as "The Bondwoman's Son." The perished home is Strindberg's own at the North Tollgate Street in Stockholm, where he spent the larger part of his childhood and youth. The old Mason, the Gardener, the Stone-Cutter, and other figures appearing in the play are undoubtedly lifted straight out of real life—and so are probably also the exploded family reputation and the cheap table painted to represent ebony—although one may take for granted that the process has not taken place without a proper disguising of externals.
There is one passage in this little play which I want to point out as containing one of the main keys to Strindberg's character and art. It is the passage where The Stranger—who, of course, is none but the author himself—says to his brother: "I have beheld life from every quarter, from every standpoint, from above and from below, but always it has seemed to me like a scene staged for my particular benefit."