The Dance of Death – Libra Theatre Café, London

Writer: Glenn T Griffin, loosely adapted from August Strindberg

Director: Glenn T Griffin

When August Strindberg wrote The Dance of Death in 1900, he trapped his miserable married couple on an island, where they could be isolated from anybody else and trapped together. No such geographical contortions are needed for this modern-day adaptation. Instead, adapter and director Glenn T Griffin places the action during the first Covid-19 lockdown, allowing the isolation and entrapment to play out in a standard London flat.

Tom Ray’s Edgar is no longer a sea captain, but an up-and-coming theatre director. His partner, Alice (Simina Ellis), was a childhood sweetheart; they attended drama school together, and she starred in his plays. But whatever romance there was in their relationship, if any there ever was, has faded.

As the lights come up, Alice is aggressively chopping up vegetables for a stew in the offstage kitchen, while Edgar moans and carps from a prone position on the sofa. The couple’s dissatisfaction with each other starts out aggressively shouty, meaning that there is nowhere much left to go. Griffin’s adaptation of Strindberg’s dialogue retains the affected mannerisms of many a Scandinavian translation, lending their raised voices an even greater degree of artificiality.

It appears that at the heart of the couple’s latest relationship breakdown is that, while Alice has been known as Edgar’s muse, she had accepted a role in Paris under the directorial eye of the mysterious Kurt. Edgar’s possessiveness and his assumption that if Alice were to be directed by someone else, she must invariably be sleeping with him also, reeks of misogynistic ideas of possession. Such thoughts are hammered home by the repeated assertion that Edgar feels the need to direct their home life as much as he does on stage.

Griffin’s script affords Edgar little chance to portray any redeeming qualities, although Ray works to at least hint at the side of the character that Alice may once have loved. Ellis has more to work with in terms of a character that alternates between being just as cruel as her partner and showing a vulnerability that suggests she is reduced to fighting fire with fire.

The arguments between the couple work best not when they are raising their voices against each other, but when each attempts to explore the relationship the other has with Kurt through the use of flashbacks. For a third character who (unlike his Strindberg counterpart) never appears on stage, enough flesh is put on Kurt’s bones by the pair’s re-enactments of their interactions with him.

There is still the whiff of misogynistic ideas of possession – Edgar goes to Paris to demand Alice be returned to him for a West End run and finds that Kurt, too, regards his leading lady as something to be bartered for. One gets the impression that if any of the three had behaved like adults, all the toxicity in the room would never have accumulated.

But this is part of the point of the piece. Alice and Edgar were once young idealists, signing a contract with each other swearing that they would never do anything to hurt the other – a promise neither felt particularly desirous to uphold in the years since. While Edgar does more than his fair share of breaking that contract daily, the downfall of their relationship is rooted in mutual destruction.

After rushing out of the gate with an overblown, overwritten argument, The Dance of Death does finally find a rhythm that allows it to explore and expose the toxicity festering in a couple’s relationship. The idea of a pandemic lockdown forcing people to stay together who belong apart ends up as being painted more vividly than one might, at first, perceive.

Continues until 28 June 2025