Theatre
Dance of Death
Citizens, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
four stars
THERE is a timeless quality to every facet of Candice Edmunds new Circle Studio staging of Strindberg's Dance of Death – in a vibrant new version by Frances Poet – that characterises great theatre. The playwright delights in rendering the best of the battling language of the bitter couple it depicts in contemporary terms. "I was born with my fists clenched," boasts Tam Dean Burn's belligerent Captain. But is it he, or his equally combative wife Alice (Lucianne McEvoy) who eventually remarks: "No-one can say that one of us is worse than the other"?
This is Strindberg presented through the prism of Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff? and the casting is just about perfect: Burn's physical presence all Max Wall angularity, McEvoy a paragon of poise, and Andy Clark their hapless foil, Kurt, trapped, temporarily, as a tool for their mind games. The performances create their own world, but presented in a fine elegantly-dressed design by Graham McLaren, on a quayside platform of railway sleepers with the audience seated transverse in two rows on each side. The spare and precise soundtrack by Luke Sutherland and Audrey Bizouerne is similarly crucial to the service of the narrative but careless of any temporal specifics.
Although the unfolding revelations are clearly the precise matter of Edgar's relationship with a wife 16 years his junior on a remote island where neighbours, and medical attention, are a boat trip away, Edmunds and her cast never lose sight of the bigger questions that the couple's distance lends its own perspective. "Are there any happy people?" it asks, aloud, with a wry smile.
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