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The Dance of Death

Trafalgar Studios (previously the Whitehall), West End
From: Thursday, 13th December 2012
To: Saturday, 5 January 2013

Our Review: starstarstarstar

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Synopsis

When an old friend comes to visit the captain and his wife, he quickly turns from saviour to prey as they toss insults like grenades, trying to gain him as an ally in their marital battleground. Strindberg's masterpiece revels in the black humour and incendiary jibes of two people locked in a deadly embrace. Only the children offer a chance to break the pattern of conflict that is their legacy. Predating Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by sixty years, The Dance of Death uses language as the most vicious weapon of all.

Our Review: starstarstarstar

Michael Coveney - 18 December 2012

A contemporary look at Strindberg's bleakly farcical marital show-down in an artillery fortress should one day incorporate both parts of the play - not seen together since the great Laurence Olivier version in 1966 and a four-hour Riverside Studios production 20 years later with Alan Bates and Frances de la Tour - but Titas Halder's sparky production for the Donmar at the Trafalgar Studios season concentrates on only the first, scripted by Conor McPherson from a literal translation by Ian Giles.

Kevin R McNally - bloated, boiling with rage, extravagantly uncouth - is tremendous as Edgar, the drunken Captain on the wane, stricken by heart attacks, hideous to his wife, Alice (Indira Varma), and disastrously vengeful when her cousin and one-time lover, Kurt (Daniel Lapaine), arrives in the town to take up the post of a quarantine master.

Apart from anything else, he resuscitates one of the truly great monstrous modern roles, one associated with Wilfrid Law...

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Cast

Kevin R McNally (Edgar)
Daniel Lapaine (Kurt)
Indira Varma (Alice)

Creative

August Strindberg (Author)
Donmar Warehouse (Producer)
Titas Halder (Director)
Conor McPherson (Translation)
Conor McPherson (Adaptation)
Richard Kent (Design)
Richard Howell (Lighting)
Alex Baranowski (Sound)
Alex Baranowski (Music)


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