Whatsonstage.com, 7th June 2013, Michael Coveney
Over a century old, but still a blistering account of a mildewed marriage, Strindberg’s
play is given the savage light treatment by Michael Pennington and Linda Marlowe
in a jagged new version by Howard Brenton.
The new title conveys the plurality of the dance moves executed by Marlowe as Alice,
a former actress whose competence on the stage is a bitter bone of contention; and
the famous frantic interlude of break-out exasperation by Pennington as the nasty
old army captain, Edgar.
Brenton, using a literal translation by Agnes Broome, has compressed booth parts
of The Dance of Death (1900) - not often done together - into two hour-long acts,
so that we see the antipathies played out in another generation, between Alice and
Edgar’s daughter, Judith (Eleanor Wyld), and her second cousin Allan (Edward Franklin).
Allan is the son of the unhappy couple’s best friend, Kurt, who introduced them to
each other and whose wife, we learn in a sudden shaft of acrid revelation, was seduced
by Edgar when he went along to console her after she left Kurt and took custody of
their children.
Kurt is easily the most attractive character on the stage in Tom Littler’s well marshalled
production, and he’s beautifully played by Christopher Ravenscroft as someone for
whom no more news is ever going to be good.
In the second play, even his house is commandeered by Edgar, along with his financial
security and political ambitions. And Edgar attempts to ruin his son, too, by consigning
Allan, who has joined his battery, to distant Lapland, where Judith will swim after
him, if need be.
Kurt has arrived on the remote island as a quarantine officer while Edgar and Alice
play out their 30-year-old cat fight. Marlowe, inured against feeling, it seems,
and flaunting a cigarette holder as though devoted to striking poses of emotional
dismissal, goads Pennington into some superbly towering rages.
From that height he delivers one of his most sustained and powerful performances,
subsiding into strokes in each half with a shuddering intensity and laying about
him with a sabre when Kurt and Alice get too cosy; their relationship is another
savage twist in a saga that is obviously rooted in the dismal, inbred atmosphere
of the place.
That place is a circular tower in the first half and an airy conservatory with view
of the broiling sea and scudding clouds in the second, a transformation brilliantly
suggested by designer James Perkins.
The show plays out as a series of snapshot scenes, punctuated with howling winds
and symphonic music, this technical side of things unusually realised in the sound
of George Dennis, the lighting of William Reynolds, and the frieze-link movement
of Quinny Sacks.
The Daily Telegraph, 7th June 2013, Jane Shilling
The thing about dramas by Strindberg is that however miserable you may be feeling
about your domestic situation when you arrive, by the time you leave you’ll be feeling
that things aren’t so bad, after all.
Strindberg’s two-part drama, Dances of Death, is a particularly excoriating exercise
in psychological warfare. Its protagonists, Edgar (Michael Pennington) and Alice
(Linda Marlowe), are the very embodiment of a dear old couple who hate one another.
They have been married for 30 years and appear to have spent all the time trying
to destroy one another. Why, then, are they still together? That is the play’s terrifying
conundrum.
Strindberg sets his plays in an island fortress, of which Edgar is the military commander.
Over the decades he and Alice, a former actress, have developed an expertly choreographed
set of routines for torturing one another. Having alienated their daughter, Judith,
what they really need is an audience - and one obligingly appears, in the person
of Alice’s mild-mannered cousin, Kurt (Christopher Ravenscroft).
Strindberg’s drama provided inspiration for many other playwrights, from Friedrich
Durrenmatt to Edward Albee (though Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf looks like a drawing-room
comedy by comparison). Tom Littler’s production of Howard Brenton’s admirable adaptation
follows Durrenmatt in presenting the plays as a series of short scenes, like rounds
in some vicious wrestling match. The production is full of intelligent awareness
of context: in the second part, the backdrop references Strindberg’s 1903 painting
The Town.
The ways in which things could go horribly wrong are myriad. The drama begins at
an almost unendurable pitch of violent loathing, which rises steadily over the next
two hours. The action takes the form of a hateful dance in which the parties engage,
then retreat before advancing again. A single false note would be enough to ruin
everything.
But Littler’s production has a magical assurance. James Perkins’s design, the lighting
by William Reynolds and the sound by George Dennis are perfectly pitched. And the
performances by the three central characters are astonishing; of a nuance and intensity
that is terrifying magnified by the proximity of the audience to the stage in the
Gate’s tiny auditorium.
At the interval one of colleagues remarked that the emotional tension was such that
she’d gnawed a small hole in her raincoat. When critics start chewing their garments,
you know that something remarkable is happening onstage.
The Independent, 7th June 2013, Michael Coveney
Strindberg’s The Dance of Death (1900) is play in two parts. Although Laurence Olivier
and Geraldine McEwan played the full saga at the National Theatre in 1966, you only
usually see Part One.
Howard Brenton, using a literal translation by Agnes Broome, has provided a sleek
new version of both parts in which Michael Pennington as the appalling army captain,
Edgar, and Linda Marlowe as his defiantly critical former actress wife, Alice, play
out their misery in the course of what now seem like two meaty one-act plays.
Brenton picks over the bones of each part faithfully, and particularly brings out
the triangular nature of the tragedy in the figure of Edgar’s old friend, Kurt -
here played with quivering sensitivity by Christopher Ravenscroft - who has arrived
on the island as a quarantine officer only to be terrifyingly destroyed by Edgar
as well.
The first part shows Alice and Edgar moving in another plateau of disagreement in
the tower but admitting that they might as well stick it out to the silver jubilee.
In the second part, they have moved down to ground level in Kurt’s oval drawing-room
by the sea.
There, Judith, their daughter, is flirting with Kurt’s son, Allan, who has arrived
on the island to join Edgar’s batter. These youngsters, well played by Eleanor Wyld
and Edward Franklin, show a new possibility for their generation, even though Edgar
looks set to scupper that, too, by posting Allan to Lapland.
Michael Pennington provides a monstrous portrait of smiling, vengeful malignity,
executing that famous dance with all the panache of Olivier and the heel-clicking
decisiveness of Ian McKellen in the role ten years ago. But he adds something more,
a sort of gloating, vulpine glee in the havoc he wreaks, and you only get that by
having Part Two.
How the couple have survived this long without killing each other is a mystery, and
there’s a Gothic horror element in Marlowe’s cradling of Edgar’s head as he suffers
his second major stroke, invoking the legend of Judith and Holofernes; you feel all
her preening and posing for several decades is released in a cathartic shout of triumph.
Strindberg’s play was devised for his Intimate Theatre, so the seventy-odd customers
at the Gate are suitably up close and personal to those fraught emotional shenanigans,
which are notably well directed by Tom Littler in an outstanding design by James
Perkins.
The Stage, 7th June 2013, Mark Shenton
Plays from Noel Coward’s Private Lives to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? Have anatomised the desperate, verbally and sometimes physically) violent
game-playing of long-term relationships of mutual hostility. But Strindberg’s The
Dance of Death, written in 1900, got there long before either of them, to provided
a chilling, thrilling portrait of the dripping poison of marital hell.
It was written in two parts of which only the first is typically performed, making
it a brutally self-contained three-hander in which a couple, three weeks short of
their 30th anniversary, are reunited with the man who first brought them together,
and have an appalled audience for their dance of contempt, distrust and fury.
But now the Gate is presenting then world premiere of a new adaptation by Howard
Brenton that adds the more rarely-seen second part. Re-titled Dances of Death, it
stretches and expands the drama to include the spread of the infection of the couple’s
behaviour like a virus to affect and infect their daughter, their friend and his
son, as a quarantine station is set up on the island and the friend comes over to
run it.
Of course the two who need quarantining more than anything else are the couple themselves,
and if their behaviour becomes a little relentless, it is also blisteringly and biliously
funny. Tom Littler’s stark, dark and elegant production is magnificently designed
by James Perkins to at once suggest the overpowering claustrophobia of their sealed-in
world but also the wider landscape, both physical and of their imagination beyond
it.
It is played with a piercing precision by a cast led by Michael Pennington and Linda
Marlowe as the warring couple, projecting the dark severity and even darker wit of
the situation that sustains them. There’s equally strong work from Christopher Ravenscroft,
Edward Franklin and Eleanor Wyld as friends and family caught in their terrible orbit.
