THE DANCE OF DEATH

 

All happy families are the same, wrote Tolstoy, but every unhappy family is unhappy

in its own way.

 

Substitute marriage for family and Anna Karenina’s famed

opening sentence sets a marker for great domestic tragicomedies

to come = at least on the world stage. From Edward Albee’s

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? winding backwards to August Strindberg’s

The Dance of Death, the power struggles of couples locked in a love

turned to hate - or to love-hate - are as remarkable for their visceral

variety as for their kinship in genre.

 

With a scattering of masterworks around and between them

(Ibsen’s A Doll’s House,  O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night),

these two plays remain thealpha and omega of the theatre’s great wedlock

war-dances. And if Albee’s playhas become world-popular on screen and

stage and in campy post-Elizabethan (Taylor) folk culture, Strindberg’s

is if anything under-seen and under-performed, a kind of lost classic .

 

Yet how startlingly modern, and one-of-a-kind, this work is.

Written in ten days in 1900,  as if to loudhail a turning-point

between epochs, it is two hours of rollercoasting marital stasis

- how else describe the paradox-riven mood? - alternating with

sudden yet insidious plot convulsions. Whenever the story stands

still, the dialogue is darkly dynamic and drivenly droll. When things

are changing - crises in the husband’s health, amorous conspiracy

between the wife and her cousin (the play’s only other character) -

the pitch can quieten to a kind of hypnotised sotto voce.  

 

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Who are these people? Edgar is a 70-ish army captain living with his ex-actress wife Alice on a Swedish fortress island. They’re at daggers drawn from the play’s start, and probably long before. Their marriage is a love-hate knockabout of venomed intensity and dark torrential ‘banter’, stemmed only, and only at times, by the arrival of cousin Kurt to take up the post of military Quarantine Master.​​​

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For those to whom the name Strindberg spells Nordic anguish - by the kilometre - it must be said, and said out loud, that the play is funny as well as feral. Funny-hysterical at times; since hysteria is never far off in this household.​

 

If the power and potency of Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? are fuelled as much by nervous laughter as by shock - with Albee’s two loving-hating spouses tearing off their inhibitions before semi-stupefied guests - Strindberg’s play doubles down on that. Not least because you don’t expect a period play to deploy themes so viscerally ‘modern’: from the hint of swinger threesomes in this couple’s domestic past to the spraygun verbal invective aimed at everyone trespassing on their lives or their pride; not least their own children.

 

At the play’s most OTT, there’s even a touch of Fawlty Towers. Two marrieds biting large bits out of each other, while aghast friends or guests gaze on (possibly wondering if they’re next).

 

Some early reviewers found the play’s shock value if anything too stimulating. And perhaps too strong for laughter. “A hospital ‘theatre’ would be the most appropriate venue for The Dance of Death” clacked one critic. “Pathological” complained another.

 

But of course, without meaning a compliment, that second critic was right.

 

The play is a pathology: a surgical exposure of the bones, tissues and organs of a relationship. As a pathology should, this one observes the effects of the past on the present, of the growing-history of the body concerned. In almost every scene, Strindberg scoops around in the characters’ yesterdays to explain their todays: their fears, failures and tormenting furies; their frail hopes of a better future, even if that may have to wait for the afterlife.

 

No play for faint hearts, it’s even less one for faint minds. Strindberg doesn’r spoonfeed the audience with exposition of his characters’ back-lives. He throws hints at us, tantalisingly and at times pell-mell - like someone throwing bread to ducks. You have to be ready for the feeding frenzy. Grab what you can: take it away; chew it, with your brain as well as your jaws.

 

No wonder the play’s multidimensional shadow seems to stretch over whole realms of world drama written since. Enigma-fraught relationships haunted by the past: Pinter. Fear of extinction and nothingness: Beckett. Disintegration, with lethal detail and insight, of a family unit: Eugene O’Neill.

 

Among the slowest people to applaud or appreciate this Swedish masterpiece were the Swedes themselves. Strindberg had to wait nine years for a production of The Dance of Death in his own country. (His other masterpiece Miss Julie, no less revolutionary, waited even longer. 18 years).

 

A prophet without honour? Or just a visionary who presented his fellow humans with a mirror portrait they had to wait to understand - since the sun of truth can make too dazzling a reflection on first encounter. That sun has to sink to the more merciful, and maturer, hours of late afternoon or evening.

 

Which may make us, the latecomers and after-generation, the lucky ones.

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by Nigel Andrews.