Man hands on misery to man, observed Philip Larkin a couple of stanzas after his notorious claim about your mum and dad. It is ably demonstrated in Part Two of Strindberg’s The Dance Of Death (1900), when the triangular relationship of Part One is expanded such that the daughter of the central couple gleefully torments the son of the third party. Despite the plausibility of a friend’s description as “the grumpiest play in the world”, it is revived (or at least Part One is) relatively frequently; the last occasion was only six months ago in Trafalgar Studios, when Conor McPherson’s translation brought out its black comedy.
    
Howard Brenton’s new version of the diptych here does not take such a tack, nor do Michael Pennington and Linda Marlowe in Tom Littler’s production. They do, however, begin on a note of grim comradeship, to which they return after Part One’s internecine stratagems have failed: it is nothing as un-Strindbergian as tenderness, simply an acknowledgement that there are worse places they could be than shackled to each other. (Brenton expands to 30 the 25 years of marriage Strindberg says they have endured, though both actors are a little on the senior side even for this much.)
    
Pennington’s Edgar is not quite the dedicated villain: his mutterings and rumblings are not so much Machiavellian as opportunistic. As Alice muses in Part Two, he (by now all hollowly smiling menace) is hardly conscious of his moves to ruin all around him. She, in turn, hatches her own plans in Part One in response to him rather than being his equal and opposite in hostility, and she is scarcely intolerable at all in Part Two; Marlowe and Littler are perhaps trying to dilute the vitriol of Strindberg’s misogyny, and they succeed without betraying the play.
    
Littler marks the scene breaks with brief, loud tattoos of the rhythm to which Edgar performs his grotesque sword-dance in Part One; James Perkins’ set discreetly points up the bleakness of both the human environment and the setting on a Swedish military garrison island, to the extent that even the wild natural vistas visible through the windows in Part Two are monochrome. It all goes to make the grumpiness bearable for the required two and a half hours, although I could probably live without seeing it revived quite as often as it has been. 

Written for the Financial Times.