DANCE OF DEATH, AT THE ARTS THEATRE
Life eh? Partners in real life, let us hope that the marriage of Lindsay Duncan and Hilton McRae is happier than the one portrayed in ‘The Dance of Death’. They play Alice and the Captain, a long-wed couple marooned on a remote Swedish island (already there is no hope). We are in bleak Bergman territory though Strindberg’s play was written way before in 1900. Anticipating Albee’s play ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’, the setting is a ferocious ding-dong between the ageing couple. He a clapped out army commander nearing both retirement and possible death, she an embittered former actress. Their life has become stagnant, she wishes him dead, he wishes her pain. It is tough stuff even 122 years on. Played on a single set – a claustrophobic sitting room over-stuffed with the detritus of long marriage – there is little action save the semi-comic barbs uttered by Alice and a high frequency of near death experiences suffered by the old fogey.
Into the arena comes a cousin, Katrin (she was a he in the original), a mysteriously morose figure with a questionable past who has come to the island for ‘peace and quiet’. Some hope in this Swedish hate nest.
There is something deeply mysterious about Strindberg and I have to admit that I have never ‘got him’. Characters emote, declaim and rant but hardly ever seem to change. There is blunt discussion of death that still seems rather shocking in Alice’s casual prayers for her hubby’s demise. The captain rails and shouts but his swagger is well past a sell-by date. This is an old couple who (classically now) cannot live with or without each other. Also no one seems able to tell the truth so we as the audience are constantly shifting in our allegiance (if any). This of course is the stuff of good, nay great, drama. But Strindberg (or was it this production) doesn’t allow one to care much about any of his characters. Neither Alice, the Cap’n nor cousin Kat passed my ‘threshing machine test’. Derived from an old Hancock episode, this posits that if you care not whether the character falls into a threshing machine or not, then the drama doesn’t hold. In this case, that old threshing machine swallowed up its three ingredients.
I found the performances strong here but somehow unconvincing and certainly unengaging. The production was somewhat flat (like that windswept island) and the three characters seemed more like cyphers than solid flesh and blood. I don’t think Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s adaptation did much to help. Peppered with C and F words it cast the play adrift from its fin de siècle historical roots and blunted some of the unexpected Victorian candour.
This is a play and production to admire, definitely to see but not necessarily to like. But maybe that’s life.
