Strindberg’s passionate appetite for the ‘powerful, cruel struggle of life’ always centred on what he saw as the most elemental and inescapable struggle of all — the never-ending war between Man and Woman. And in Dance of Death he created what is generally considered to be the ultimate exploration in all literature of the battle between the sexes — a marital inferno of unparalleled vitriol. If you think you’ve ever had relationship problems, you can rest assured that you’ve seen nothing yet.

Dance of Death transports us to a rocky island off the coast of Sweden, with angry waves crashing endlessly just outside the converted prison tower that is home to a man and a woman locked in a personal hell of their own making, goading, tormenting and torturing each other in a savage game of lies, love and hate that can end only in death.

Edgar, an army captain, and Alice, a failed actress, have lived together for twenty five years of mutual contempt and aggressive boredom. He has tried to kill her in the past, while she passionately longs for his death, and more than once he appears to be on the verge of obliging her. And yet they seem to have so totally interwoven their psyches that neither of them could long survive without the other.

Into this cauldron of emotion comes Alice’s cousin, Kurt, who has returned to the island to become a quarantine officer. He was forced to end his marriage ten years earlier and lost his children at the instigation of Edgar. He was also the man who brought Edgar and Alice together in the first place. At first his intrusion into their malevolent pas de deux seems beneficial. He persuades Edgar to stop drinking, while seducing Alice with the thought of passion and escape. In reality, he becomes the hapless and unwitting weapon that the pair use against each other.

It is an absolutely mesmerizing piece of theatre — viscerally gripping and yet not without some savage comedy — and it has the distinction of simultaneously being the defining influence on both the naturalistic and the expressionist drama of the 20th century. As a naturalistic portrait of marriage gone wrong, it was an inspiration to Eugene O’Neill for Long Day’s Journey Into Night and to Edward Albee for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. But as an expressionistic evocation of the absurdity and pointlessness of human existence it also looks forward to such works as Sartre’s Huis Clos and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Though it has to be said that by comparison with Strindberg’s trapped and embattled couple, George and Martha are having the mildest of domestic tiffs, and Vladimir and Estragon are really getting somewhere.

It offers tremendous acting roles — in particular the Captain, Edgar, whom Strindberg described as “a refined demon — evil shines out of his eyes, which sometimes glint with satanic humour. His face is bloated with liquor and corruption, and he so relishes saying evil things that he almost sucks them, tastes them, rolls them around his tongue before spitting them out. He thinks of course that he is cunning and superior, but like all stupid people he becomes at such moments a pitiful and petulant wretch.” It is a part that has always attracted great actors, and was a major success for Erich von Stroheim, Laurence Olivier and, most recently, Ian McKellen.