A darkly comedic battle of the sexes
The Dance of Death
(out of 4) Written by August Strindberg, in a new version by Conor McPherson, directed by Martha Henry. Until Sept. 10 at the Studio Theatre, 10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara-on-the-Lake. shawfest.com or 800-511-7429
Unhappy marriages make for meaty theatre.
This bit of wisdom — proved again and again through the success of 20th-century dramas from O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night to Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? — finds its theatrical precedent in this strange and difficult play by August Strindberg, written in 1900 and here staged in a challengingly freewheeling manner by Martha Henry.
Strange and difficult, because Strindberg juggles many styles and influences. The basis is drawingroom naturalism, but the figures also come across as mythic types whose actions can’t entirely be tied to psychological motivation.
Death hangs over everything, as signalled by the reference to the medieval danse macabre in the title: life allegorized as an inevitable, grotesque (but oddly festive) procession toward the grave. And the looping nature of the action paves the way for existentialism and absurdism: it’s hard to believe that Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett weren’t even born when Strindberg conjured up Edgar and Alice, stuck in a circular pattern of destructive bickering.
And have I mentioned it’s presented here as a black comedy? There is an element of dirty good fun watching other people tear strips off each other.
The production starts strong, as Jim Mezon and Fiona Reid are richly suited to the battle-of-the-sexes material in its first scene.
Edgar is an army captain and a heavy drinker holed up in a tower on an island with his former actress wife. They disdain everyone else in their community as “scum,” are increasingly unable to pay the bills, and nag and provoke each other to vent frustrations and possibly just to pass the time.
Irish playwright Conor McPher- son’s version of Strindberg’s text is contemporary and stripped back, and sounds muscular and credible as spoken by Mezon and Reid.
While there are many laughs in this first extended sequence, darkness is omnipresent. William Schmuck’s set communicates isolation and oppressiveness.
Behind double doors we can see the sky (the colours ever changing in Louise Guinand’s design) and, thanks to James Smith’s soundscape, sometimes hear the sea, but there is also the unexplained and constant presence of a sentry (Landon Doak) marching back and forth along the balcony: material evidence of the couple’s paranoid relationship to the rest of the world.
The foil in this scenario is Alice’s cousin Kurt (Patrick Galligan), who comes to the island to serve as its quarantine master and gets sucked into this sick vortex of a relationship. McPherson’s version hints that Kurt is a potential sexual plaything, but this is a key point where Henry’s production falters.
In the script, Alice and Kurt are supposed to be15 years younger than Edgar and she still in good posses- sion of her powers of coquettishness and seduction, but Mezon and Reid come across as approximately the same age (late 50s/early 60s) and Galligan five or 10 years younger. There is little erotic spark between Reid and Galligan, and scenes of increasing intimacy are tentative and sometimes awkward.
Kurt is a challenging part — he’s got a dark past, represents possible financial salvation, and becomes Edgar’s confidante as well as Alice’s potential escape route.
Add to this a vampire subtheme that this production gingerly hands to him alone and you’ve got a bunch of different character traits that Galligan struggles to make into something performable.
While Mezon’s facility for physical comedy is well-exploited here, what remains relatively underplayed is the theme, largely embodied and voiced by Edgar, of the omnipresence and yet profound fear of death.
Focusing on it more fully might have give audiences more to hang on to; all the same, it’s exciting to see Shaw stage this bracing material and to embrace rather than attempt to solve all its complexities.