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.