National Theatre A Dream Play -- Angus Wright as Alfred the dreamer. Click photo for larger image.

LONDON -- There's an essay to be written on the current vogue of translations/adaptations of classic plays by name playwrights, as if such work were a new perk of success. In London now, you can see Euripides' "Hecuba" in a new version by noted playwright/poet Tony Harrison, Chekhov's "The Seagull" in one by Tom Stoppard, and Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" by (and directed by) Richard Eyre.

Such versions are often not translations in the usual sense, since the playwright does not know the original language, working instead from a literal translation. Some versions go farther and amount to adaptation (Brian Friel's "Uncle Vanya") or actual rewriting (Thomas Kilroy's "The Seagull"). But on this continuum of re-creation, a special case is the National Theatre's new version by Caryl Churchill of August Strindberg's famous 1902 experiment, "A Dream Play."

Churchill ("Top Girls," "Mad Forest," "Far Away") is a great playwright, up there with Pinter and Stoppard. But her text of "A Dream Play," sold in the lobby (the normal case in London), isn't exactly Strindberg, as she admits in an introduction that summarizes her many cuts and changes, all based on a translation by Charlotte Barslund.

"I'm not sure how I'd feel if someone treated one of my plays the way I've treated Strindberg's, even though I hope I've made it clearer and not spoilt it," Churchill writes. "Perhaps when a play is over 100 years old you should just be glad it's still being done."

Well, yes, I guess. But even Churchill's "Dream Play" is far closer to Strindberg than what we actually see on stage, which is billed in the theater program as "by August Strindberg, in a new version by Caryl Churchill with additional material by Katie Mitchell and the company."

In Mitchell's director's note, she describes her own process of remaking -- moving the play from 1900 Sweden to 1950s Britain, identifying Strindberg's nonspecific dreamer as the broker, Alfred (Strindberg's officer), and mixing in Freudian and Jungian material about dreams improvised by the company. You wouldn't know that the character Agnes is meant by Strindberg to be the daughter of Indra (Churchill: "daughter of the gods"), come to earth to experience human suffering.

So, yes, this is "A Dream Play," emphasis on the "A," but it is not Strindberg. The distance it has traveled is intensified for an American, for whom the English accents label the whole as thoroughly English.

But it is a compelling experience, nonetheless -- a surreal, frantic 95-minute journey through dream and nightmare. Deprived of Strindberg's obsessions with religion (cut by Churchill as "a bit unnecessary") and even his riddle of life ("a bit of an anticlimax"), the play loses its subject matter, but it replaces that with what was also important to Strindberg, the whole irrational, scary, enticing process of dreaming. This, Mitchell and her inventive company of 10 convey with great theatrical imagination.

But you can't call it Strindberg. For the innovative, ever-questing Swedish playwright, novelist and memoirist, you do better to walk further down the Thames to Tate Modern to see the large exhibit of his vivid paintings and sketches, running concurrently with "A Dream Play" through May 15.