There is still no exit

The Dance of Death Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake Engaged Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake Nobody ever accused August Strindberg, Sweden’s premier playwright, of doing things by halves. In The Dance of Death, written in 1900, he gave us the most miserable married couple in the history of drama, and then drove the point home by having them live in a prison. Really it’s a fortress but, certainly in Martha Henry’s Shaw Festival production, it looks like a prison.

William Schmuck’s set gives us bars on the windows, and a sentry marching on the platform outside, more visibly and more frequently than in any other production of the play I’ve seen. In fact there are two sentries, both played by the same actor: a young and vigorous patrolman in Act One and an older one with a conceivably symbolic limp in Act Two. The young one casts the occasional glance inside the living quarters, suggesting he’s appalled by the suffering he sees and would like to help out, but wouldn’t know where to start. He has our sympathy.

The couple in the castle are Edgar, a low-grade military captain who resents just about everybody, and Alice, a former actress who mostly resents Edgar. She blames him for ruining her career by marrying her, for alienating his colleagues and superiors whom he indiscriminately dismisses as “scum,” for their consequent poverty and for the fact that they can never keep a servant. He blames her for there never being any food in the house. Almost their only link to the outside world is the telegraph; phones have been invented but Edgar is too paranoid to allow one on the premises. The play’s first half-hour has them exchanging insults and grievances as in a game, one that’s been going on for years. By way of illustration, they settle down to a game of cards, knowing it’s going to provoke more argument. Still, the couple that plays together stays together, and these two, approaching their silver anniversary, are plainly in for life.

The catalyst for action is the arrival of Kurt, Alice’s cousin and one-time lover, newly appointed as this island outpost’s quarantine officer. Husband and wife each try to enlist him against the other. He tries to be charitable to both. He enlists medical assistance for Edgar, who has a series of what appear to be strokes but keeps bouncing back, and he lets himself be re-seduced by Alice. But their combined malevolence defeats him, and he finally flees what he calls “this hell,” leaving his hosts to wonder at the unaccountable way in which some people behave. The play unexpectedly anticipates Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, though its more commonly cited successors are Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, hell as an eternity of other people, and — for obvious marital reasons — Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Albee’s inferno is more fun, but Strindberg’s feels more authentic. He really thought men and women were like this; he himself had been married twice before writing The Dance of Death and he went and did it a third time afterwards — his life plainly imitating his art. Line by tortured line, blow by psychological blow, much of the play is painfully believable. Strindberg took himself and his obsessions very seriously; any humour in his plays is unconscious.

Henry’s production does have occasional comic touches, but what’s best about it, in a streamlined adaptation by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson, is its lucidity. For the first time I could actually follow Alice’s and Kurt’s plot against Edgar. I could not, however, care.

Jim Mezon’s Edgar, a selfintoxicated ramrod, grows in command as the captain grows in grotesquerie, notably when dancing to his wife’s piano rendition of his favourite tune the Entry of the Boyars and — with his author’s typical lightness of touch — collapsing at the end of it. The woman, for once in Strindberg, is a lesser monster than the man, but Fiona Reid unexpectedly falters in the mix of vulnerability and venom. She’s best in her remorse and relief when her schemes go blessedly awry. Kurt could easily come over as a wimp, but Patrick Galligan gives him real passion, almost too much of it at points.

An apt prelude to Strindberg’s view of marriage is W. S. Gilbert’s view of courtship, as presented in his 1877 comedy Engaged. Gilbert without Sullivan means we get the author’s bracingly cynical view of human nature, unsweetened by pretty tunes.

The hero, so to speak, is Cheviot Hill, a rich young man whose governing qualities are a fanatical stinginess and the compulsion to propose to every young woman he meets. He acquires three fiancées in the course of the play, every one of whom is after his money, as are their relatives and Cheviot’s supposed friend Belvawney.

The play’s first act is set on the border between England and Scotland, whose differing marriage laws make it possible that Cheviot may have become unknowingly hitched. The second act, in London, makes hilarious hay of his predicament and its ramifications; the third flags a bit, as by now we’ve got the message that everyone is mercenary and have to wait around until they’ve all got paired off in a straight-faced parody of a happy ending.

By and large, though, the play is a delight, certainly as directed at the Shaw by Morris Panych on wittilyexaggerated sets, exteriorrural and interior-urban, by Ken MacDonald. Gray Powell gives a superb performance as Cheviot, distinguished by his capacity to change course multiple times in a single sentence without ever losing the thread. Diana Donnelly, trailing the longest of wedding trains (Charlotte Dean did the costumes) is comparably delicious as a self-proclaimed innocent who is also a self-confessed gold-digger; Nicole Underhay can be very funny as her rival, though she doesn’t place her tragedyqueen outbursts in the right ironic perspective. Jeff Meadows is affable as Belvawney though without the hypnotic intensity the character is said to have when he takes his glasses off. Martin Happer is wonderfully lachrymose as a kilted peasant whose occupation is to block railway trains so that his neighbours may make money off the stranded passengers. Shawn Wright is admirable as a moderately heavy father, and out of this world when he sings an old music-hall song entitled My Mother Doesn’t Know I’m on the Stage. Poor mother.