If you’re programming a season of theatre and wanting to set yourself up for success, you could make a worse decision than to assemble three of the country’s most acclaimed stage actors (Pamela Rabe, Colin Friels and Toby Schmitz) under the direction of Australian acting royalty Judy Davis.
You might also think it’s a safe bet to set them loose on a play by one of the most important dramatists to have ever lived (August Strindberg). And if you’ve got a set by Australia’s most influential theatrical designer (Brian Thomson), what could possibly go wrong?
A fair bit, it turns out.
Strindberg’s The Dance of Death follows an artillery captain, Edgar (Friels), and his retired actress wife, Alice (Rabe), as they engage in a ritualistic feud, trading verbal barbs and rubbing salt into each other’s wounds.
They’ve been married for 25 years and have isolated themselves on a strange island – they refuse to use a telephone for fear of surveillance and receive all their communications via telegram – but their world of comfortable misery is rocked when Alice’s cousin, Kurt (Toby Schmitz), arrives on the scene. He can immediately sense that there’s something poisonous about their home – and it seems to be hemorrhaging staff – and fears he’ll be sucked in by it. That turns out to be a pretty accurate prediction.
Strindberg wrote the play in 1900, but you can see in it the seed of a model of marital warfare that would be expanded upon in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which happens to be a much richer, more entertaining and complex play. The co-dependence of Alice and Edgar as they hurtle towards annihilation has shades of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Again, better plays than this one.
This isn’t Strindberg’s finest moment, with its single-mindedness and clunky dramatic turns. Of course, there has to be some degree of repetition if you’re to explore ritualistic suffering, but there are few moments when we see these characters’ humanity or understand the impact of the rituals that have rusted onto them. If Strindberg wrote the relationship between Alice and Edgar with much nuance (and given that I don’t speak Swedish, I really can’t judge) it certainly doesn’t come through in the literal translation that Davis uses.
The verbal sparring just doesn’t zing because the barbs are all lifted from another century and another language. It’s a shame that there hasn’t been a more thoughtful adaptation here (it’s easy to imagine Joanna Murray-Smith might have actually made the sparring funny) because, despite their sharp characterisations as the tyrranical captain and the ghoulish, melodramatic actress, Rabe and Friels both struggle to make the dialogue ring true.
Davis wisely has the pair lean into the comedic side of this tragicomedy, but it comes at the expense of emotional truth. And, counterintuitively, it would likely be funnier if both just focussed on playing the truth, rather than signposting the comedy. Both veer dangerously close to mugging, and seem well outside of their comfort zone.
Schmitz fares a little better, tracing Kurt’s evolution and eventual corruption with clarity, but his character really only exists as a mirror for Alice and Edgar’s dysfunction.
At least it’s an attractive production to look at. Thomson’s set takes the island setting rather literally, with a central playing platform surrounded by a moat of water. It feels very much like a musty, damp prison, thanks to some steady drops of water falling from the ceiling and Matthew Scott’s moody lighting design. And Paul Charlier’s score, with its out-of-tune piano solos, is appropriately creepy.
Perhaps Davis’s intention is revealed in the design – to give an audience the sense of imprisonment; the claustrophobia caused by this trap that Alice and Edgar have set for themselves. But it’s never that visceral and their world is hard to grasp. Instead, we’re caught in a familiar trap of the western theatrical canon with yet another married middle class couple relentlessly at each other’s throats.
It’s not hard to imagine that this team might’ve set fire to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but this play feels like an island too remote for any of us to reach.