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"The tone of the production
is beautifully established in the opening scene of desperate
habit-ridded boredom.".
Irving Wardle
The Times
"We have Alan Bates
presenting a roguish, personable party, unpleasant perhaps, but
cocky and limber, a bit of a wag... "
John Peter
The Times
"Mr Bates's excellence
at off-hand mockery and dismissive rudeness makes his account
of pushing his wife into the sea irresistibly comic..."
Martin Hoyle
Plays & Players
"[...his] last-gasp
defeat and subsequent death leave you with a feeling most unusual
for Strindberg, that you've just witnessed a happy ending..."
Benedict Nightingale
The New Statesman
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t h
e a t r e
The Dance of Death
The Dance of Death, by August Strindberg
(Edgar) 1985, Riverside Studios, Hammersmith
Adapted by Ted Whitehead, based on a translation by Brian Rothwell.
directed by Keith Hack
The critics are of at least
two minds on this production:
some felt glad that the warring couple were humanized so that
we see ourselves in them; others felt that the interpretation
let Strindberg down: "It is depressing to see two major
actors
playing out scenes of ratty bourgeois bitching," says John
Peter,
while Irving Wardle contends that "the performance is generally
low-keyed, and wary of anything approaching the grotesque."
from Plays & Players, July
1985
WHAT IS THERE in the air of Hammersmith that is so conducive
to levity? Recently the Lyric gave us an uproarious "Seagull,"
even though the sight of a drunken Masha striding round like
an emancipated modern barmaid as she set 'em up for a boozing
session froze the smile on this pair of lips at least; and now
that archetypal harrower, born partly of Stringberg's attraction
to his own sister, that coruscating look at matrimony besides
which "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is a marriage
guidance pamphlet; now "The Dance of Death" in a buyant,
springy and often very funny production holds the stage at Riverside.
 All credit to Ted Whitehead's new version
where the occasional over-informal ring of modernity can be forgiven
for its liveliness. Credit, too, to the production team also
responsible for the recent Glenda Jackson "Strange Interlude."
Voytek's set again creates an enclosed but not hermetic world
in which characters who know one another too well bluff, deceive,
side-step, wound, parry, repent and puzzle over their own feelings.
Keith Hack again directs a cast led by a cogently intelligent
actress. Again, what could be a mammoth ordeal -- here the two
parts are run together for three and a half hours -- remains
gripping throughout.
One reason is the sheer unpredictability
(rare in a classic which we theoretically all know) of the characters'
motivation. As the chained couple Frances de la Tour and Alan
Bates ring a set of emotional variations on their basic loathing,
from the apathetic toleration of mechanical smalltalk ('we repeat
the same lines night after night') to a tongue-in-cheek conniving
in obvious melodrama that the Bliss family in Hay Fever would
recognise (Strindberg's Alice is also an ex-actress). Mr Bates'
Edgar recalls his near-fatal heart attack in tones of portentous
vagueness: 'I saw the other side. Though I've forgotten what
I saw the vision stays with me'. The sanctimonious role-playing
(Perhaps when death comes life begins') in which they tacitly
concur -- shades of Albee's George and Martha -- is sometimes
interrupted by the prosaically gossipy (in mid-scene: 'Do you
think Kurt is really a hypocrite?' 'Oh definitely'). They generate
a feeling that these two really know each other, once loved,
have private jokes and in-references, have shared a life.
Given this undoubted relationship, the production
seems uncertain what to do with it. The lightweight mood is too
flimsy for references to '25 years in hell...welded together'
to ring true. The bickering as here presented scarcely justifies
her talk of 'blind hatred without reason, without purpose, without
end' or his dying gesture of spitting in her face. Perhaps the
production takes its cue from her ultimate decision to speak
well of the deceased.
Equally there is a discrepancy between the
embittered army officer of the first part, awaiting retirement
in the failure of genteel shabbiness, despised by and despising
the others in the barracks-town, and the high-power manipulator
of the second part, kingpin of the local community, able to buy
up the home of the ruined friend who aroused his jealousy.
Mr Bates's excellence at off-hand mockery
and dismissive rudeness makes his account of pushing his wife
into the sea irresistibly comic ('I can scarcely believe myself
capable of such discourtesy'). Nowhere near as old, ugly or bloated
as Strindberg intended, despite his occasional recourse to Patrick
McGee-type vocal creaking, he is matched in charm by Ms de la
Tour, one of the most sheerly watchable actresses on the stage
today. That bony face with its sad eyes, aggressive nose, wide
mouth and deceptively reticent chin, can be fey, gauche, clownish
or steely. She and Mr Bates fence with an enjoyment that sometimes
goes beyond their roles; they must beware of an element of send-up.
All sympathy to Kurt, the old friend allured,
used, toyed with and abused, one of Michael Byrne's best performances,
though at times the tense trio is reduced to bewildered guest
and tiresomely squabbling hosts ("Hay Fever" again?).
The younger generation is strongly portrayed (though I had little
feeling of hell repeating itself in thirty years' time), especially
by Robert Morgan's intense but controlled cadet. Anne Louis Lambert
splendidly redeemed that BBC Lucrezia Borgia and the miscast
NT Lydia Languish. Graham Large's lighting and Di Seymour's costumes
add to the visual appeal. Immensely enjoyable; but as a glimpse
of matrimonial hell as convincing as "The Good Life."
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Reviewer: Martin Hoyle
from The Times, 31.v.85
by Irving Wardle
IT IS OFTEN THE HABIT of the postwar theatre to claim Strindberg
as its master, and then get busy correcting him. One prominent
offender was Durrenmatt, who converted "Dance of Death"
into a joke sporting event played by pugilistic manikins. And
Ted Whitehead followed a similar line in last year's Cambridge
version, which even offered to improve on Strindberg's ending
with a cyclic recap of the opening lines, showing Captain Edgar
and Alice glumly contemplating another night at home in each
other's detested copany.
Mr Whitehead has now had another go, and
nothing could be more different than the version that arrives
at Riverside with Frances de la Tour and alan Bates as the marital
duellists. The new text gives them an equal choice of weapons
and, more surprisingly, terms of alliance and even fondness.
All this is in key with Keith Hack's production,
which telescopes the play's two parts into an evening of some
three and a half hours (from which I had to beat an early retreat),
and which resolutely sets out to relate Strindberg's monsters
to commonplace experience of marital torture.
"...an inspired line...sums
the work up.
Is life comic or serious,
somebody asks.
The captain answers: "It's
a scream."
The performance is generally low-keyed, and
wary of anything approaching the grotesque. Given Strindberg's
own notes on playing style, this could have yielded as great
a distortion as Durrenmatt's: and there are moments when expected
climaxes fall decidedly flat.
The captain's dance dwindles from a frenzied
display of aggression to a self-conscious little shuffle that
could hardly have put him out of breath, much less brought on
a heart attack.
But there are two powerful justifications
for the style. First, it relates the lurid first play to its
cooler sequel (in which the wounds of the parents are passed
on to their children); and second, it enables the audience to
see themselves in characters, rather than sit back to observe
the excesses of a schizophrenic genius.
The tone of the production is beautifully
established in the opening scene of desperate habit-ridded boredom,
with Miss de la Tour picking invisible spots of dust off the
furniture and the captain yawning his way through a game of cards,
both of them vigilantly awaiting the first alert of impending
hostilities. The arrival of Kurt (Michael Byrne) gives them the
pretext for virtuoso displays of social double talk.
Miss de la Tour takes the more perilous course
of playing the suffering victim.
The ending of the first part shows both partners
struggling through to an extraordinary point of elation where
they make a temporary peace in the shadow of death. This also
sets the scene for their withdrawal from central position to
observe their children, Anne Louise Lambert and Robert Morgan,
re-fighting the same battles in the second play. Mr Whitehead
has an inspired line that sums the work up. Is life comic or
serious, somebody asks. The captain answers: "It's a scream."
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from New Statesman, 7.vi.85
by Benedict Nightingale
IF YOU WANT misogyny at its most unabashed, you should of
course start your quest with Strindberg's "Father,"
which describes a wife's mental, emotional and physical destruction
of her husband, and "Miss Julie," in which a similarly
power-hungry female takes on a man rather more resourceful than
herself and gets her comeuppance. His "Dance of Death"
is a later work, and perhaps a bit more indiscriminately paranoid.
In the first half, which dates from 1901, Alice doesn't seem
a lot less sour, mean-spirited, self-pitying, rancorous and vindictive
than her husband Edgar; and in the second, which Strindberg composed
in 1905, she might almost be described as sympathetic, or at
least averagely wicked where he's downright evil. It's he who
evolves from an everyday swine into a full-blooded ogre, he who
pursues a merciless vendetta against the old friend who has presumed
to make mild passes at his spouse, he whose last-gasp defeat
and subsequent death leave you with a feeling most unusual for
Strindberg, that you've just witnessed a happy ending. When Alice
greets his fatal stroke with undisguised glee, hits him in the
face and amiably threatens to tear the tongue from his mouth
-- well, it's less a judgement on what she is than on what he's
done and made her become.
 Frances de la Tour and Alan Bates are in
the opposite corners of the Riverside ring, she sullen and bored,
bleating out querulous recriminations in that stricken sheep's
voice of hers, he mottled and coarse, the sort of man who looks
sweaty even when he isn't actually sweating and sounds vaguely
malicious even when malice has momentarily deserted him. That
reading is not wrong, but maybe not quite right enough, not if
we're to give proper weight to the violence of the language E.
A. Whitehead has so adroitly translated, not if we're to believe
Strindberg's own remarks on the characters. 'A refined demon,'
he reportedly said of Edgar. 'Evil shines out of his eyes, which
sometimes flash with a glint of satanic humour. His face is bloated
with liquor and corruption, and he so relishes saying bad things
that he almost sucks them, tastes them, rolls them around his
tongue before spitting them out.'
Bates is bloated and bad all right, but you
couldn't call his swagger of contempt satanic, you couldn't say
he is exactly gormandising on malice. The object of Keith Hack's
production, the reason it's relatively so muted, is (I suspect)
to suggest that it isn't just Strindbergian marriages that are
morally ruinous to men and women. Plenty of less obvious, less
spectacular disasters are recorded in Somerset House. But the
problem with the production, the reason it's a little disappointing,
is that this marriage is Strindbergian -- and we don't fully
feel it. ||||
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