Play Strindberg review – a punchy satire on the state of marriage

Strindberg’s savage Dance of Death was hugely influential on 20th-century European and American theatre, providing inspiration for any number of unhappy marriage dramas that followed, including Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt revisited Dance in this 1969 reworking of the first part of the play. It gives Strindberg and his imitators, perhaps even the state of marriage itself, a playful fingers-up by filtering the action through a mid-20th century despair, cut with a grotesque absurdist satire.

Hell is not just other people, but two particular people: former actor Alice and Edgar – a pompous army captain disappointed by his career, children and life itself – who for 25 years have imprisoned each other in a relationship built on spite. They are both determined to be the last one standing. Dürrenmatt pares the play down and makes it punchier, reimagining it as a 12-round boxing match in which a gong sounds between each round. Alice’s cousin Kurt, who arrives after a 15-year absence, differs in intriguing ways from Strindberg’s original character and functions like an unexpected stranger arriving in a Pinter play.

There are three very fine performances in this revival, although Alistair Beaton’s new translation and Nancy Meckler’s production never quite find the dark sardonic humour in the story, or point up Dürrenmatt’s absurdist view of the world and marriage with the lethal delicacy they require. I’ve seen revivals of Strindberg’s original that mine the comic horror of the situation far more effectively. But Richard Clothier brings a smooth, reptilian presence to the self-interested Kurt, Greg Hicks raves and dribbles like a tin-pot domestic King Lear, and Sally Dexter is a superb Alice, sly, coquettish and defeated, intent on having the last laugh even as she colludes in her own captivity.

• Until 11 October. Box office: 01225 448844. Venue: Ustinov, Bath.

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