Dance of Death Review – Spark and Mischief as a Horrified Couple Wishes Each Other Dead | stage

AAugust Strindberg’s portrait of marriage is an unrelentingly bleak dance of death. It shows the type of couple who finds their partner’s way of breathing offensive – or the other’s as well Still Breathing. She wishes him death, and he pretends to rise above it but bides his time. They seem to exist on shared hate, not love.

So, if this blast of Nordic nihilism seems too cold in the bleakest British midwinter to stomach, there’s a surprise afoot: Richard Eyre’s glowering adaptation brings comedy and tenderness alongside brutality. The Strindberg pair went from being simply awful to being humorously and poignantly awful.

It’s terrible but entertaining as they compete to design Ashley Martin-Davis’s drawing room set, full of long-vanished grandeur. You can see the play’s influence on Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf but here existential depth and questioning enter the realm of tragicomedy with dark laughs.

The film is also directed by Ayer, and is aided by two amazing lead actors: Will Kane, who plays the ailing army captain, Edgar, and Lisa Dillon, who plays his frustrated wife, Alice – a one-time actress who repeatedly reminds him that she might have been a stage star if she hadn’t married him. They drown in a pool of mutual remorse and irascibility, playing reminiscent power games Hamm and Clov in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (who’s the master and who’s the slave here?), but they also have something of the absurd, intensely isolated couple in Ionesco’s The Chairs. Jeffrey Streatfield is capable but a little overshadowed as Kurt, Alice’s cousin, who becomes a pawn between them.

Because this production is actually two-spirited, balancing the question of who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist in a marriage – and the drama. Ken and Dillon bring such a spark and mischief to their parts. You laugh at every one of them, but you also feel for them. He exudes resolute stoicism until he criticizes. She’s childish in her spite but you suspect she’s the real victim here.

Eyre moves her original setting in 1900 to the time of the Spanish Flu in 1918. It’s an inspired idea, this forced proximity imposed on a couple, from which reports of the Covid pandemic, domestic disharmony and rising divorce rates mount in its wake.

The set opens intermittently to blue streaks of sea waves, as if to suggest that there is more to life out there than this terrible claustrophobia. However, there is anxiety about isolation, the absence of children, and most of all the fear of not having anything in the world, except death. The sick Edgar is not so much afraid of death as he is afraid of the specter that there is no afterlife in a godless world. Is it a play about death dressed up as a marital drama? Are the characters tearing pieces away from each other to fill the space? These are questions I never asked myself until I saw this production.

So tango is terrible to death but brings a rare and captivating pathos. For a play that risks shrinking into joyless desolation, this expands into something far greater than a mere marital misery-fest. Not to be missed.