Strindberg wrote Dance of Death in 1900. He followed it immediately with a sequel, Dance of Death Part 2. The two plays are occasionally presented together, but Part I was intended to stand alone, and Part 2 is vastly inferior, probably only written to provide a happier ending when Strindberg’s German translator remarked that the play as it stood was too grim to be performed.

Like most of Strindberg’s work, there is a kernel of autobiography at the heart of the play. Strindberg had recently stayed with his sister Anna, who had given up her musical career in order to marry, and her husband Hugo van Philp, an irreligious man with whom Strindberg sat up all night discussing death, after Philp suffered a heart attack. The fact that Strindberg felt an attraction towards his sister certainly gives an extra dimension to Kurt's guilt about his lust for his cousin Alice. However Philp always denied that his marriage was the model for the one depicted in the play (well, you would, wouldn’t you?) and there were certainly other possible originals. Strindberg’s own tempestuous marital experiences no doubt furnished him with plenty of material as well.

Naturalism or Expressionism?
As a naturalistic portrait of marital strife, Dance of Death is often seen as a forerunner of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day's Journey into Night, and Edward Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. This is true as far as it goes, and Strindberg is rightly seen alongside Zola and Ibsen as one of the founders of Naturalism. The Preface to Miss Julie is universally regarded as the most important manifesto of Naturalism in the theatre; and The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888) are important milestones in the development of the style. But Strindberg's later plays, such as A Dream Play (1901) and The Ghost Sonata (1907), are experiments with a more 'musical’, surrealist and expressionist form of drama. Dance of Death is on the cusp, and has elements of all these styles. In its depiction of life as an existential hell whose protagonists are trapped in an absurd and meaningless cycle of verbal and mental aggression and gamesmanship, the play also looks forward to such non-naturalistic works as Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (which we are presenting at The Questors next season).

Strindberg once said that he drew his characters as 'split and vacillating’, and for all their surface naturalism they often behave in ways that seem contradictory, arbitrary and inconsistent. The philosophy of late 19th Century Naturalism was that character should be seen as consistent and explicable in terms of heredity, environment and so on; so even in his early work Strindberg anticipates the more 'modern’ view of human nature as elusive, ambiguous and contradictory.

This balance of the naturalistic and the expressionistic is a difficult tightrope to walk, and different productions have taken radically different approaches. Our production tonight is, I suppose, essentially naturalistic – at least on the surface – but there are certainly moments when symbolic, expressionist and irrational elements rise to the surface. We will have to leave it to your judgement to decide if we have fallen off the tightrope or not.

Tragedy or Black Comedy?
One critic has described Dance of Death as "an unmatched black comedy about the routines and pyrotechnics of marriage." On the other hand, many were critical of a recent production of the play and accused it of "playing it for laughs." Clearly a play about death, misery, mental torture and extreme selfishness – in which emotion is usually extreme and always naked and raw; and in which the only consolation to be found is that, although life is hell, there is a remote possibility that death will bring a small spark of hope – is unlikely to be a huge barrel of laughs. And yet we have often laughed in rehearsal, and will not be altogether surprised if you do tonight.

That is not to say – I hope – that we are playing it for laughs. Our concern in rehearsal has certainly been to do justice to the complexities of misery, suffering and cruelty that the characters inflict upon one another, and to present the play in all its stark bleakness. But, as Kurt remarks of Edgar, "He’d be comic if he weren't tragic," and as Edgar says himself near the end, "When life is a farce it can be a nightmare." Sometimes extremes meet, and laughter seems the only sane response to the misery and meaninglessness of life – or, at least, of some lives.

Steve Fitzpatrick