Having collaborated on Strindberg´s Dance Of Death in New York, director Sean Mathias and acclaimed thesp Ian Mckellen are set to reprise the Swedish classic in the West End.

Dance Of Death (1900) by Swedish playwright August Strindberg is a bitter, blacky funny portrait of a marriage. Alice, who can never forget that she gave up her career as an actress for her husband, and Edgar, a captain in the army passed over for promotion, daily tear each other apart, dragging any hapless visitors into their domestic maelstrom. In 2001, Sean Mathias directed Ian McKellen in the role of The Captain on Broadway. Now Mathias and McKellen are doing it again in the West End, but in a new production with Frances De La Tour as Alice and Owen Teale as Kurt. McKellen and Mathias were once partners, and have worked together often in the past. They last collaborated on a hugely successful production of Uncle Vanya at the National Theatre in 1992. We caught up with them in rehearsals.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

(On New York)

Sean Mathias: I was originally asked to direct Strindberg´s play by the Shuberts in New York about seven years ago, and I said I didn´t think I could.

Ian McKellen: Because?

SM: I didn´t think I was mature enough. I was only in my thirties, and I was frightened of it. Then they asked me again about three years ago. And I thought, "Oh wow. It seemed incredibly funny and violent but it´s not like there´s one cruel character and one victim. They´re equally tortured. And you´d been saying to me ´I´d love to do that play again`. You were doing a film in Toronto and I came to visit you. We went out to lunch and I said ´I´ve got a play for you`. Do you remember that conversation?

IM: No.

SM: You said `What is it?` and I said Dance Of Death, and you went ´Ooh`. You read it and said yes straightaway, which is always a joy because sometimes the actor needs a lot of seducing, but it´s great when they just respond to the character. Because then you feel they´ve got a good chance of playing it well. The more you´ve got to explain…

IM: Hang on, I didn´t know…

SM: How to do it. But you had an instinct. You weren´t full of conditions or anxieties. You were ready to take on the challenge.

IM: It´s always exciting for me if I think I´m not sure how to do it. It´s always a good way to go into rehearsal.

SM: We wanted to do it in London. Even though it was well received on Broadway, I never thought the production fulfilled the play – some of it was good and some of it we never quite got – so it was frustrating.

IM: Like Sean, I felt it was unfinished business. It did terribly well. We shouldn´t underplay that.

SM: It was a bit of a hit.

IM: And under those conditions. We opened on September 18, exactly a week after that disaster when no one was going to New York. The audience who saw us were local theatregoers and they like strong meat.

SM: You´d run into people who would say ´What´s your play called? Dance Of Death? You´re not really going to go through with that, are you?` I thought: Nobody´s going to pitch up. But that wasn´t true.

(The previous weekend they had been on a research trip to Sweden).

In an ideal world we should have gone to Sweden a month before we started rehearsals. But sometimes people can only arrive in a city a few days before rehearsals start – (in a stage whisper) especially when they´re big stars.

IM: What I picked up there were two things. One: confirmation that Strindberg is a modern writer. He was ahead of his time. The other thing was to understand where this play takes place. Of course, I could have looked at a map. Protecting Stockholm are all these little islands, and one of them has this fortress which is there to defend the city. They´re not fighting soldiers. There hasn´t been a war for 100 years. They´re more like civil servant sin uniform. And, suddenly, a lot of the play made sense. They´re bored. They´re stuck here. There are no past warrior glories that The Captain´s trailing.

SM: The most enlightening thing for me was realising – so obvious – that Strindberg was Swedish. Meeting all these Swedish people with the characteristics of the people in the play – not necessarily to the same degree. It humanised Strindberg.

IM: What characteristics?

SM: Very formal and polite on the outside, and after a couple of drinks, more wild and crazy.

IM: Heavy drinkers.

SM: Volcanic.

IM: Edgar is probably an alcoholic. And Kurt, the returning cousin, is off the drink. Swedes drink.

SM: Incredibly cold and long dark winters, as we all know. So you want to drink. We drank so much. They kept telling us that because of the cold you burn it all off. Don´t believe it.

IM: They tell you little stories about Strindberg. He´s present in Sweden. That is very reassuring. I always like to think when you´re doing a classic that the author might just drop in. I wonder what we would ask him if he did.

SM: What I´d want to know is whether the characters are aware of how much their subconscious is motivating them. In other words, when they do something that´s so totally contradictory…

IM: He wouldn´t know that terminology. It´s all post-Strindberg.

SM: Well, we´d sit him down and give him a little potted history of the past 100 years, and then I´d ask him. Because that´s the thing the actors endlessly ask me: ´Do I know that I´m lying?`

IM: I´d ask him about his extraordinary scene when Strindberg has Edgar do certain actions that indicate he´s going to change his life, that he´s going to stop drinking, stop smoking and stop playing cards, and leading the life that he was. But it´s all related to whether Strindberg wanted a different sort of acting. I tried doing that in New York, which I think we´re agreed was not totally successful, so we´re not going to do that again. But it still puzzles me.

SM: Because it´s an actor alone on stage with no words, you feel it´s not very interesting or even watchable. The behaviour is symbolic, but of course you can´t act symbolically.

IM: But it´s because of that scene that I always hoped one day I´d do this part. Because I saw Laurence Olivier play it. I can remember him prowling around that set very, very effectively. But I misremembered one thing about it. I could have sworn that he threw a cat right across the stage. Edward Petherbridge, whose job it was to receive the cat from Olivier, assures me that he never, ever threw it. But it´s one of the reasons why I´ve always wanted to do the play.

SM: It´s very sadistic of you to want to throw a cat.

IM: I´m still not convinced that he didn´t. The Swedes are very conscious of that performance because it was funny. (Whispering) I don´t think the Swedes go in for humour.

SM: I think we were surprised at the number of laughs we got in New York.

IM: I don´t think we´ll be pointing the London audience in that direction. If they choose to find it funny, that´s fine.

Dance Of Death previews from Thursday (Feb 21st) at the Lyric Shaftesbury.

Two BBC News (online) articles

Independent Digital UK review

Times Online review (NYC production)

International Herald Tribune