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Dance Of Death

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It's a pity that Strindberg isn't read much anymore, because his gloomy understanding of human relations, especially between men and women, still has insights to offer. Bergman swore by him, and one could do worse than take Bergman as an acute critic.

"The Dance of Death," which many see as one of Strindberg's best, focuses on the marriage of Edgar and Alice on the eve of its silver anniversary. Edgar is a failed career military officer, a bullying, self-absorbed man who lives for his food and drink and seems to have lost sexual interest in his wife. Alice is a one-time actress convinced (probably falsely) that she gave up a promising career to marry Edgar. Kurt, Alice's cousin who suddenly moves to the remote island where Edgar is stationed, enters the action early on, and is quickly absorbed into the malevolent atmosphere of Edgar and Alice's marriage.

And malevolent it is. Both spouses have fallen into the habit of perpetual deceit, lying to one another about everything so incessantly that they've begun to half-believe their own deceptions. The tissues of lies in which they wrap themselves and one another are both protective insulation and connections: they more they create a false world, the more trapped in it and dependent on one another they become. Alice is perpetually on the point of leaving Edgar. Edgar is perpetually on the point of dying. Both celebrate the potential absence of the other, and both are absolutely terrified of it.

Strindberg, then, presents us with the portrait of two people who despise one another and want to be free, but whose personalities and worldviews are so bound up together that they can't really live apart. The prospect is gloomy, which is perhaps why Strindberg wrote a second part to the play, rarely performed, in which the son of Kurt and the daughter of Alice and Edgar seem to make a fresh start, escaping from the older generation's poisonous atmosphere. But even here, things are ambiguous. The daughter, Judith, is beginning to show definite Edgar-like traits.