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Couple have one ‘hell’ of a marriage
THE DANCE OF DEATH
Pentameters theatre
UNABASHED misogynist and purveyor of Nordic gloom: this is a judgment often passed on the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, who died penniless and alone nearly 100 years ago.
It’s a judgment I’ll admit I made myself prior to seeing Harry Meacher’s excellent new version of The Dance of Death.
That’s not to say Meacher’s Dance is all tea parties and lavender by any means; plenty of dark fire still courses through its veins. In a former prison, on an island referred to as “Little Hell”, ageing army captain Edgar (Meacher) and his wife Alice (Judi Bowker) spend their days idly picking at the festering wound of their 25-year marriage. He drinks and she terrorises the servants while they wait, with barbed tongues and a Beckettian desperation, for the end. “Oblivion,” exclaims Alice, “if only I could be sure of it.”
Their death throes are interrupted by the arrival of Kurt (John Fairfoul), an old acquaintance with history on both sides who soon becomes a sounding post for all of the pair’s squabbles and pent-up fears. Adultery, recriminations, divorce and death rise swiftly to the surface.
Real-life husband and wife Meacher and Bowker lend a ring of truth to the jaded couple that are unable to shift a lingering undertow of attraction towards one another. Bowker’s embittered, plum-syllabled Alice is a perfect foil for Meacher’s swaggering, apoplectic major, deftly treading the difficult line between heart attack convalescent and sexual dynamo.
“It is our duty to torment each other,” Edgar observes summarily, and they do it so well it is a shame when they have to stop. Strindberg’s play has always stood by the credo “misery loves company”; Meacher’s production goes one better, suggesting that misery shared can provoke not only solidarity but also, in the darkest corners, a peculiar yet genuine happiness from its subjects.
Until December 23
020 7435 3648 |
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