August Strindberg’s portrait of marriage is unremittingly bleak in Dance of Death. It features the kind of couple who find their partner’s way of breathing offensive – or just that the other is still breathing. She wishes him dead, he pretends to rise above it but is biding his time. They seem to exist on co-dependent hate, not love.
So if in bleakest British mid-winter this Nordic blast of nihilism seems too chilly a prospect to sit through, there is a surprise afoot: Richard Eyre’s candescent adaptation brings comedy and tenderness alongside the savagery. Strindberg’s couple is turned from merely horrible to humorously, movingly, horrible.
