Lucky Richmond. Not only is it regularly voted the happiest place in London, it’s also home to the Orange Tree Theatre, where locals can get close to weighty actors performing thoughtful revivals of classic dramas in an intimate in-the-round space. Veteran director Richard Eyre’s new adaptation of August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death ticks all those boxes. But despite its excellence, I don’t think it’s going to boost the borough's happiness ratings: Strindberg’s savage study in marital misery leaves no hope un-quashed.
Alice (Lisa Dillon) and Edgar (Will Keen) have been trapped together for nearly 25 years on a military outpost off the coast of Sweden, surrounded by ‘bastards’ and ‘morons’. Imagine a gloomy, Nordic middle-aged version of Love Island in which the couple bond because they loathe everyone on the island, especially each other. Their neighbours don’t speak to them, their servants have done a runner and their children (the two that haven’t been killed by the brutal climate, that is) prefer boarding school. Then one stormy night, a potential bombshell arrives in the form of Kurt (Geoffrey Streatfeild). Will he rescue Alice? Team up with Edgar? Or merely be the enabler for yet more sadistic cat-and-mouse games?
Eyre’s sweary, funny adaptation of Strindberg’s play makes the most of the biting humour which drives this appalling couple on (‘She's angry with me because I didn't die yesterday’, Edgar explains to Kurt. ‘I'm angry with you because you didn't die before I met you!’, Alice shoots back). It also boasts a tour de force performance from Will Keen as Edgar, a boot-slapping, tyrannical military failure who loves to feast on human misery but is made pitiable by his fear of death and the pointlessness of his existence. Keen plays him as the ruin of a strong man: his facial spasms and stiff jerks initially seem like the tics of an irascible old soldier who’s spent too long without social contact but, as the tension ramps up, they start to look more like PTSD or cardiac arrest. It is an extraordinarily embodied performance: at one point he was so racked, grey-faced and sweat-soaked that I considered calling an ambulance.
Dysfunctional marriage was a favourite topic for the thrice-divorced Swedish playwright, who knocked off this drama in two months in 1900. Dillon makes something feline and compelling out of Alice, a former actress who seduces and schemes, alternately shrinking from her husband then pouncing on his weaknesses. Is Alice Edgar’s victim? Co-villain? Or a performative fantasy of a bad wife? Despite his championing of women’s rights, I’m not convinced Strindberg was very interested in finding out: he writes duels, and the main psychological insight here is that mutual dependency and cruelty can go hand-in-whip in marriage. And it's Edgar who has the whip hand from the start, beating his wife in every round of cards, despite his dodgy eye-sight, and later brilliantly manipulating his infirmity to raise and dash her hopes. Alice and especially Kurt, are more thinly characterised: despite lashings of S&M to raise the tension, I didn't really believe in their relationship. But it is impossible to know what to believe: Edgar and Alice connive and lie; some later plot developments seem concocted on the fly and their backstory reveals lack the harrowing psychological mutuality of, for example, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which drew on Strindberg's work to perfect the toxic marriage drama.
Ashley Martin-Davis’s gorgeous set brings stormy seas and skies into the drawing room, placing striped bluish canvases above and on all four sides of the action, and Peter Mumford lights them beautifully to imply darkening night then rain-washed dawn. Eyre’s direction, like his adaptation, is clever and robust and finds every possible laughter line. He ingeniously brings the action forward a couple of decades to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919, providing a bit of context for all the nihilism. However, there is not much sense of a larger world here: Strindberg lacks the morality of Ibsen or the compassion of Chekhov; qualities which enabled his contemporaries to inquire more deeply into marriage, and to portray wives as more than a shrill bundle of histrionic poses. Dance of Death feels personal: bitterly funny but also narrow and claustrophobic. It's not exactly date night material, but an unflinching close-up production like this is the best possible way to see it.
