The Red Room

by August Strindberg

When he had carefully dressed himself, he went out to see the actor-manager, whom he confidently expected to find at the theatre between twelve and three.

To be on the safe side, he arrived at the office at twelve o'clock; he found no one there but a porter, who asked him what he wanted and put himself at his service.

Rehnhjelm did not think that he would need his help, and asked to see the actor-manager; he was told that the actor-manager was at the present moment at the factory, but would no doubt come to the office in the course of the afternoon.

Rehnhjelm supposed factory to be a slang expression for theatre, but the porter explained to him that the actor-manager was also a match manufacturer. His brother-in-law, the cashier, was a post office employé and never came to the theatre before two o'clock; his son, the secretary, had a post in the telegraph office, and his presence could never be safely relied upon. But the porter, who seemed to guess the object of Rehnhjelm's visit, handed him, on his own responsibility and in the name of the theatre, a copy of the statutes; the young gentleman was at liberty to amuse himself with it until one of the managerial staff arrived.

Rehnhjelm possessed his soul in patience and sat down on the sofa to study the documents. It was half-past twelve when he had finished reading them. He talked to the porter until a quarter to one, and then set himself to fathom the meaning of paragraph 1 of the statutes. "The theatre is a moral institution," it ran, "therefore the members of the company should endeavour to live in the fear of God, and to lead a virtuous and moral life." He turned and twisted the sentence about, trying to throw light upon it, without succeeding. "If the theatre is a moral institution," he mused, "the members who—in addition to the manager, the cashier, the secretary, the machinists, and scene-shifters—form the institution, need not endeavour to practise all these beautiful things. If it said: The theatre is an immoral institution and therefore ... there would be some sense in it; but that, surely, the management does not intend to convey."

He thought of Hamlet's "words, words," but immediately remembered that to quote Hamlet was stale, and that one ought to clothe one's thoughts in one's own words; he chose his own term, and called the regulations nonsense, but discarded the expression again, because it was not original; but then the original was not original either.

Paragraph 2 helped him to while away a quarter of an hour in meditation on the text: "The theatre is not a place for amusement; it does not merely exist to give pleasure." In one place it said the theatre is not a place for amusement and in another the theatre does not "merely" exist to give pleasure, therefore it did exist to give pleasure—to a certain extent.

He reflected under what circumstances the theatre ministered to one's pleasure. It was amusing to see children, especially sons, defrauding their parents, more particularly when the parents were thrifty, goodhearted, and sensible; it was amusing to see wives deceiving their husbands; especially when the husband was old and required his wife's care. Besides this he remembered having laughed very heartily at two old men who nearly died of starvation because their business was on the decline, and that to this day all the world laughed at it in a piece written by a classical author. He also recollected having been much amused by the misfortune of an elderly man who had become deaf; and that, together with six hundred other men and women, he had shouted with laughter at a priest, who tried, by natural means, to cure his insanity, the result of self-restraint; his mirth had been particularly stimulated by the hypocrisy displayed by the wily priest in order to gain the object of his desire.

Why does one laugh? he wondered. And as he had nothing else to do, he tried to find an answer. One laughed at misfortune, want, misery, vice, virtue, the defeat of good, the victory of evil.

This conclusion, which was partly new to him, put him into a good temper; he found a great deal of amusement in playing with his thoughts. As the management still remained invisible, he went on playing, and, before the lapse of five minutes, he had come to the following conclusion: In a tragedy one weeps at just those things which in comedy make one laugh.