Richard Eyre’s production of Dance of Death at the Orange Tree Theatre refuses consolation, revealing how August Strindberg engineers’ endurance, cruelty, and sympathy as inseparable theatrical forces. What emerges is not marital savagery for its own sake, but an uncompromising examination of how survival within intimacy hardens into power, control, and continual moral recalibration.
The setting declares its intentions early. Edgar (Will Keen) and Alice (Lisa Dillon) are marooned on an island: socially isolated, poorly provisioned, surrounded by life yet excluded from it. Communication arrives only in telegraphed fragments, operated by Edgar; the noise of a neighbouring party drifts in as a reminder of what they are not invited to share. Their four children are absent — two dead, two fled — leaving the marriage sealed in on itself, without mitigating voices or moral witnesses.
The production opens with the amplified sound of crashing waves — a blunt reminder that the island is not symbolic but physical, even before it becomes clear that the true isolation lies within the marriage itself.
Act I subjects the audience to a sustained barrage of verbal combat, punctuated by occasional flashes of humour. Edgar and Alice circle one another in a competition of insult and endurance, each exchange sharpening rather than resolving the last. The relentlessness is exhausting and, at moments, risks monotony — but this exhaustion is deliberate. Strindberg offers no release, no conventional dramatic arc. Cruelty here is not an eruption but an accumulating habit, a means of maintaining friction in a world where silence would feel like annihilation.
Eyre’s direction ensures that this hostility never collapses into caricature. Keen and Dillon play Edgar and Alice not as grotesques but as people for whom this damage has long since become ordinary.
The arrival of Kurt (Geoffrey Streatfeild) is handled with particular acuity. Neither redemptive nor disruptive, his presence is quietly catalytic. Alice’s cousin and a voice from the past, Kurt is himself divorced, estranged from his children, and diminished by failure. He brings not relief but exposure, breaking the closed loop of the marriage and allowing power to reorganise and intensify.
Strindberg uses Kurt to expose what happens when endurance fails and conflict becomes the only available form of life: the weak are not spared — they are consumed. Kurt unmasks Edgar and Alice not by challenging them, but by being destroyed in their orbit.
The pivotal moment comes with Edgar’s mock declaration of divorce. In a period when a woman’s legal and economic protections were minimal, the threat of expulsion carries existential terror. Alice’s vicious response reads less as innate cruelty than as panic weaponised. When she subsequently agrees to become Edgar’s nurse, and his tone softens into something resembling tenderness, the relief is palpable — and chilling. This is not reconciliation, but hierarchy restored and legitimised.
Keen’s performance makes this transformation disturbingly persuasive. Early on, Edgar clings to uniform and regalia as though rank itself were a form of armour. By the final scenes, the sword has been replaced by a walking stick; the body appears diminished. Authority, however, never loosens its grip — it simply changes register.
Watching this production, one is briefly reminded of Anton Chekhov — not because Strindberg resembles him, but because he so ruthlessly refuses Chekhov’s ethic of endurance. Where Chekhov allows life to continue through restraint and waiting, Dance of Death insists that survival depends on friction and power.
By the end of the evening, the audience is left not with catharsis, but with unease. This production does not ask us to approve of Strindberg’s vision — only to recognise how easily endurance fails and is replaced by combat, and how thin the line can be between care and control. It is an uncompromising, unsettling experience, made all the more powerful by its refusal of consolation.
Dance of Death
By August Strindberg
Adapted and directed by Richard Eyre
Cast: Lisa Dillon; Will Keen; Geoffrey Streatfield
Set and Costume Designer: Ashley Martin-Davis
Running time: 2 hours
Until: 07 March 2026