The first part of August Strindberg’s 1900 play is a blueprint for some of the cornerstones of 20th-century drama. In trapping three characters on an isolated island, it is like Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos in which hell turns out to be other people. In its portrayal of a 25-year-old marriage of two imposing personalities who are addicted to each other’s bile, it foreshadows Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And in its vision of a couple’s cruel interdependence, it sets the pace for much of the work of Samuel Beckett.
All of which adds to the claustrophobic edge of Candice Edmunds’s tightly choreographed studio production, performed at close quarters on the driftwood floorboards of Graham McLaren’s set. In a freely adapted version by Frances Poet – complete with new melodramatic ending – this is the story of Lucianne McEvoy’s Alice and Tam Dean Burn’s Captain whose war of marital attrition gains a weapon in the form of Andy Clark’s Kurt, the long-lost friend who supposedly introduced them.
It’s a delicately calibrated conflict and, at the production’s most electrifying, they play it as such. The balance, however, is repeatedly upset by Dean Burn’s decision to play the Captain not just as a tyrant but as a grotesque. Noisy, performative and erratic, he is much larger than life. In contrast to McEvoy’s wise restraint and Clark’s calm, he seems unhinged. That may give the others reason to despise him, but it also undermines the subtle interplay of the psychological drama.
-
At Citizens theatre, Glasgow, until 7 May. Box office: 0141-429 0022.
