A play about about a half-crazed married couple locked together in splenetic isolation may not seem ideal fare for Christmas. But Titas Halder, as director of the second work in the Donmar's West End season, has grasped a fundamental truth about Strindberg's 1900 play: that it is not a naturalistic tragedy, but a grotesque comedy that anticipates the work of theatrical absurdists such as Beckett and Ionesco.
On the face of it, the situation looks grim. Edgar, a garrison captain, and his wife, Alice, a thwarted actor, prepare to celebrate 25 years of married torment in the fortress they laughably call home. Half-starved and seething with contempt for everyone on the island, they fall with malign glee on Alice's cousin, Kurt, who arrives to be the new quarantine master. Since it was Kurt who brought them together, he becomes a weapon in their domestic warfare, as well as someone to confide in. But, contaminated by their viral passion, Kurt eventually beats a retreat leaving the pair in a state of exhausted reconciliation.
It is easy to see the influence the play had on Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But both Halder's production and Conor McPherson's new version spark other connections. I was reminded of Ionesco's The Chairs, which also takes place in a remote fortress, and of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which also features a couple who can neither stand to be together nor to live apart: even the last line, in which the immobilised Edgar announces "You keep going," has a strong Beckettian echo. If the play has a tragic element, it lies less in Edgar and Alice's love-hate relationship than in their capacity to infect others. Although Daniel Lapaine as Kurt looks too young to have been the marriage-broker, there's an extraordinary moment when he sits in Edgar's chair and goes brick-red with anger as if about to turn into the mad captain.
The two main parts are also played with the right preposterous venom. Kevin R McNally's bullet-headed Edgar has a superficial toughness that quickly turns into the bluster of the frightened bully: he looks exactly like a man for whom military rank provides an authority he signally lacks. Indira Varma perfectly catches Alice's mix of vamp and vampire: she calculatedly excites Kurt but also looks as if she survives only through parasitic blood-sucking. It is not, of course, the most balanced portrait of relationships. But it is a profoundly seminal work and, when McNally and Varma sink to the ground like a pair of slumped prizefighters, you vividly sense Strindberg's view of the absurdity of the human condition.
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