“Dance of Death” Orange Tree, Richmond

With Littler’s help, perhaps Strindberg’s time has come – yet again. Like Kierkegaard’s storm petrel, in interesting times. Particularly though the Dance of Death. In 2022 the Arcola’s Dance of Death in a version by Rebecca Lenkiewicz toured. In 2023 Norway’s Nationaltheatret played at the Coronet, with an existential ferocity that remains unmatched in versions I’ve seen. Days later Radio 3 broadcast Conor McPherson’s version.

In Eyre’s own translation, there’s more air and light – with expletives and heightened humour. It’s an atmosphere reflected in the staging. Peter Mumford’s lighting steals in murky afternoons, deceptively bright mornings and claustral dawns with a ruthless piercing through one door of two. The air, unusually, includes an interval two-thirds through, meaning the play runs two hours; tension is relaxed just slightly. More viscerally, the air blasts those doors open as storms rage. Several times. Overhead and around the balcony, a glowering cerulean-blue glimmers the seascape.

Ashley Martin-Davis’s set of faded eggshell blue-greens gone greyish counters claustrophobically-compressed furniture: including sofas and an all-important telegraph poised on the desk. Props embrace an ever-tapped barometer and wrought-iron hatstand. Martin-Davis’s costume design features a peacock captain’s dress uniform and marginally less dressy one; soft browns and light greys for the visitor and quiet glamour for Alice, often in black. John Leonard’s sound design involves that Boyars’ dance on the piano (played by Tom Attwood) and relatively gentle music upstaged by whirling storms, whistling and banging through.

Opening at cards unsheathes the play’s claws gently. Lisa Dillon’s former actress Alice is trapped in a hate-love-hate marriage approaching twenty-five years: to Will Keen’s Edgar, an unpopular captain whose career’s stalled as he commands an island quarantine station. Anti-social, the couple have even set their surviving departed children against them both. Ten years Alice’s senior Edgar suffers from heart trouble he privately knows will kill him. “She’s angry with me because I didn’t die yesterday” states Edgar after one of these bouts that leave him as oblivious as in an epileptic fit; allowing vicious jibes to fly about him. “I’m angry that you didn’t die before I met you!” Alice delightedly ripostes.

Using Alice’s theatrical memory-muscles, Dillon’s gimlet-eyed with small telling flicks of the head. This poise fuels her every move: scornful, sexual, scabrously funny. Keen’s at once lean and draws Edgar as abrupt, wired, living on his nerves’ capital; capable of feral switchbacks and ambush. Yet he’s more rampant than some Edgars, theatrically romping with every faux or real heart attack. His performative little deaths might have acted his wife off the stage. Certainly Keen’s burlesque gestures in the Boyars’ dance wrongfoot everyone else. Scarlett Mackmin’s choreography here and elsewhere enlarges this tight space. But that of course underestimates Dillon’s feline exultance, her silken pounce. Dillon’s quiet, often still, till she isn’t.

Geoffrey Streatfeild’s Karl, whose rumpled grey-browns unfurl from his mask and overcoat, is someone played out of his depth. What Streatfeild conveys isn’t so much in innate vampirism (as in the Coronet’s) as one borrowed. It reveals itself as he and Alice make explicit what other productions play with. Here there’s consummate motives as to why necks are bitten and Karl humiliatingly obeys Alice. Strindberg stripped bare beyond his language, even.

There’s intimacy too; as they spar and declare hate they entwine, kiss necks, writhe in a sheet of old flame that might be heaven recalled in hell. “You make me into a beast” Kurt tells Alice. “Why did Kurt have to come and seduce me?” Alice complains later to Edgar, flagrantly lying.