Fiona Reid as Alice and Jim Mezon as Edgar in The Dance of Death. Photo by David Cooper.
For the Shaw Festival’s production of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death, William Schmuck’s set is an existence-defining circular space with bars on the windows in an old fortress on a Swedish island. It helps us to soon conjure up the Sartrean conclusion in No Exit that “Hell is other people.” Also Beckett’s direction in Waiting for Godot, “They do not move.” One is trapped in this space, there is no corner in which to hide. Wherever one goes, the result is the same. As the existentialists have it, one is hurled back on oneself, condemned to one’s existence, whether alone or in one’s relations with others. Strindberg here in his play concurs that one cannot escape other people.
Of course this setting includes a door to an outer walkway where a sentry walks back and forth, back and forth. Perhaps, with Camus’ option of suicide as a possibility, one can jump over the wall and into the sea to one’s death. Or one can continue to live, by choice or by habit. So the set is most apt in reflecting the confined absurdity of existence of the play’s two main characters—husband Edgar and wife Alice. They savour their absurdity, they have no other choice, there is nothing else they can do. They find any way to keep busy.
In her must-read program notes, director Martha Henry recalls seeing a Stratford production fifty years ago of The Dance of Death with Denise Pelletier as Alice and Jean Gascon as Edgar, the Captain. I saw it too and I have seen this masterpiece of a play only one other time—in London with Alan Bates and Frances de la Tour, an unnerving production far from the city’s West End. One thing I recall about the Stratford production is how Gascon said the word Alice. It felt hard as rock, cold as the coldest ice, unmovable, aggressively unaggressive, and so chilling I cannot forget hearing it.
Gascon’s captain was defiantly military in a domestic setting, at war with everyone in a take no prisoners conflict with the world. At the time, I assumed that I understood the innards of Strindberg’s play completely—youth is presumptuous and arrogant, isn’t it? Martha Henry’s production, however, albeit with some modernization and tightening in Conor McPherson’s version, helps me to discover still more, both domestic and marital with an existential twist, and forces me to deal with it. All the while, Louise Guinand’s lighting design for this challenging production creates an atmosphere in which light itself seems doomed to human fate.
At the outset we meet Alice and Edgar in a not too nasty bickering mode, and she refers to their marriage as “our long miserable mistake.” Each one refers to death and he to blowing his brains out. Jim Mezon, whose large and threatening presence has elsewhere suggested a cosmic force, now seems more an aging old fart, imposing but still obviously getting old. Fiona Reid’s Alice seems quite adept at irony and we hear what is elsewhere one of the most musical of comic voices to now be slightly nasal with a slightly elongated current of whining bitterness. We make note when Alice asks “How can we know what goes on in a marriage,” for this question guides Henry’s production. Preconceptions about these people do not do well here. Much surprises and we have to keep catching up.
At the beginning, these people are not affectionate, but not unaffectionate. Each one seems wired to erupt into bitchiness and to take on the other. She laughs at him because of his unsent letter and he squints at his cards. He seems bumbling, and the two of them like dead end lives trying to get at the other. When Kurt arrives, the need for external acknowledgement and attention, a need from both Edgar and Alice, is broadly demonstrated. They also put on a show for their guest and play at social niceties. “I won’t lie, Kurt, we’ve had our ups and downs” says Edgar, as he grabs and paws at his guest. He also explains “You have to cling onto the wife because the children piss off”.
And when Alice whispers to Kurt “You make him so nervous,” we hear a not unkind marital understanding. But Kurt also tells Alice, “I know how cruel you can be to men.” Meanwhile, we feel that the Captain and his wife are more tired of life than vindictive. Yes, Alice says “That man’s a stranger to me” and, yes, Edgar says “We are bound by some evil force” as each continues to undermine the other. But something more than interpersonal hell is going on—in the production and therefore in us.
When Edgar does his Dance of the Boyars, panting all the way, and collapses, Alice declares “Is he dead” in a matter of fact manner that also suggests some shock, perhaps loss. His stroke is done in a broad physical manner, one that edges towards exaggeration, but this is also the way people’s bodies behave. When he has a second seizure, the audience has a hearty laugh as we witness Edgar’s contorted body, perhaps dead, before us. The audience commits itself, in laughing at him, to laughing at themselves. We are indeed what goes on here before us as we decay. In theatre like this, we see how we ourselves are performers when death is unrelenting and not at all far away.
Since this is Strindberg turf, what goes on before us is not pleasant. Hear what his characters say: “His ugliness was frightening …And I married him” and “You ruined my life before my eyes” and “The captain’s campaign has started in earnest against me—and against you” and “His main goal is to wreck your reputation.” And see what these characters do: Alice dumps his boots on her passed out husband and gives Kurt a flirtatious look, then a passionate kiss. But always in her passion we sense with it a manipulation, a cynicism bred perhaps from living many years in a hopelessness that makes one mean to survive. Sometimes we feel Alice’s rage as she stands by the table. The captain, meanwhile, describes the cruel things he has done, like getting Kurt’s son to be posted under his command. He sneers at his wife that he has petitioned for divorce and of course we get sucked into this marital fray.
Kurt may blurt out, much to his sorrow, “I want to kill him,” but we suddenly realize that we don’t really know these people. They distract us with the cruel things they do and the implications of who they “really” are, but we too, like each of them, feel we are being used to fill in the nothingness that we all live even as we deny it. She says he has long been beating her, he rips up the will leaving all to her, she plans to unite all of Edgar’s enemies, as she vigorously dances on his imagined grave, and the captain demolishes her portrait. People get meaner in order to endure. But what do they mean?
When Alice grits her teeth and Edgar throws away his booze, we too have become part of the fight and don’t know what is genuine and what is pointless, diverting, and even playful distraction. When Alice leads on Kurt with her exposed breasts, he, confused and horny, escapes, leaving her to enjoy her power – and we agree with him that she is a “devil.” But we also sense that she is hurting from a life that hasn’t worked out. Edgar cuts her off when she comes on with her illusions about her failed theatrical “career,” so now she is pleased when she arouses intense sexual feelings, uncontrollable ones at that, because this means power. This means she is alive.
In Henry’s production of Strindberg’s play we witness over and over malicious hearts beating under a veneer of habit. We also witness a surprising male bonding when Kurt and the Captain sit down and chat about life and survival. But maliciousness continues to peak through the silly hurtful antics these people use to keep themselves busy inside these walls, walls that are both physical and symbolic. We are made, as we watch, to feel over and over that there is nowhere to hide. We listen as the Captain creates a whole fabric of lies to get at the other two. And Alice looks ridiculous with her broad gestures as she leaps about to cover up the telegraph message she doesn’t want the Captain to hear. She looks ridiculous because that is what she is—that is what we are. Being alive makes us all ridiculous.
I thought I had mixed feelings about this production at times as I watched, but in truth I didn’t quite know what my gnawing feelings were. We are not given a secure point of view by the director and actors, because in this strikingly honest production we are made to be involved and always unresolved in our feelings And then, after all the mess of human existence we have been dragged through, we see Alice and Edgar, with their shared resolve and affection, holding hands, sharing laughter, almost cozy as he compliments her looks and she his.
In all, they are simply now calmed down to the people they also are at other civilized times in their relationship. But Alice and Edgar still live a “pointless joke” and await more of their “eternal torment.” The Captain says “you forget and you keep going” and though this is said to a background of wistful perhaps hopeful music, it doesn’t make existence bearable or forgivable for anyone. We who have watched others are therefore stranded in thinking about others and therefore about ourselves.
Jim Mezon as an actor can be devastatingly hard, overwhelming and scary, and as the Captain he is also sometimes pathetically inept and vulnerable. Fiona Reid as an actor can be a pinnacle of comic idiom, timing and flexibility, and as Alice she also unsettles us with carefully measured and cruel purpose. Patrick Galligan as an actor can convey a frenzied sincerity and much grace and as Kurt he also conveys a complex and evasive psychology that understandably opts for escape.
These much-admired actors use consummate skill in making their chaotic, complex, nasty, and at times surprisingly humane characters an incisive reflection of us. We are entertained and taken in, through them, by both the comic and the tragic. We are diverted and challenged, but given no answers. Their mastery is to make us look at both the stage where they embody their characters and equally in the mirror where we, as other actors, await our own gaze. And now, because of Henry’s insightful, moving, and unavoidable revelations in this production, we must, if we choose, find answers in ourselves.