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London Theater: McKellen dances with Strindberg

Sheridan Morley International Herald Tribune

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

The Sean Mathias revival of Strindberg's "Dance of Death," which comes to the Lyric Shaftesbury from a triumphant Broadway run last year, is still built around the craggy, crabby presence of Ian McKellen, though with Frances de la Tour taking over from Helen Mirren as the unhappy former-actress wife.

Few risks were taken with Strindberg in New York. Indeed, the front of the house had a vast photograph of McKellen and Mirren grinning widely while dancing around some invisible ballroom, as if to reassure customers that their $50 would get them something more like a Jerry Herman musical than a searing Scandinavian forerunner of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

"Dance of Death" was the play Strindberg said he took the greatest pride in, largely because of the role of the Captain, driven mad by desperate loathing of his wife but forced to acknowledge at the last that all they can do is "blot out the past and go on living," as bleak a conclusion as any ever achieved by Samuel Beckett.

But the Mathias production remains in some curious way at odds with itself. A welcome new Richard Greenberg adaptation seems to want this to be Strindberg's take on Noel Coward's "Design for Living," a play also in the Mathias repertoire and also concerned with two men and a woman who can live neither apart nor together and are the cause of each other's emotional destruction.

I have no trouble with that interpretation, except that the Robert Jones set looks like Castle Dracula, or maybe the kitchen of the Addams Family. Yet the idea of a comedy about people linked only by tragedy and still discovering the depth of their mutual marital loathing ("Our silver anniversary - you mean you want to celebrate it?") works well enough thanks to the mesmeric, tyrannical performance of McKellen, never better than when executing the terminal dance of the title.

Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune