Review: The Dance of Death, The Libra Theatre Café

The Libra Theatre Café is the perfect boutique venue, owned and run by talented creatives and home to the writer Glenn T Griffin. Its 40-seater underground theatre invites audience members’ immersion in each production, and is ideally suited to The Dance of Death, revived and refreshed by Griffin, from August Strindberg’s original 1889 play. He brings us to Covid 19’s enforced lockdown of 2020, where we are confined to a small apartment, along with the heightened pressures on strengths and weaknesses, aspirations and deceptions of relationships.

As we enter the theatre space, real newscasts on a large TV screen remind us of the morbidity rates, fear and restrictions that Covid regulations placed on us all. The apartment is set with the ritual elements of the pandemic; a large bag of toilet rolls, masks and hand sanitiser by the exit, the drone of the TV and the deployment of the slow cooker using up whatever was found at the back of a cupboard.

Griffin’s deft hand ensures that there is sufficient content relating to Covid, both in set and conversations, to keep its audience in this timeline, whilst retaining the focus on its two protagonists and their complex and messy relationship. His pithy writing ensures that we remember the washing of food items, whilst using this as a lever to demonstrate wry, contrasting views to “dry or not to dry” before consuming vegetables. As the time switches between pre-Covid and 2020, clever colour coding of lighting reminds us where we are and sets the moods of the events that we witness.  

Simina Ellis (Alice) and Tom Ray (Edgar), are seen to be absorbed in their experiences of theatre as actor and director respectively. Ellis and Ray are fully invested in their characters; the power dynamics of dominance, direction, vulnerability and barbed interactions to wound and maim. Griffin’s wit is apparent in the language of theatre and characterisation of each of our protagonists. “What game are we playing?” moves from the seeming innocence of a card game, to interactive direction of each against the other, dragging out past events and submerging the spectator in their toxic interactions.  

Griffin makes good use of stillness to allow us to absorb the breadth and depths of feeling as the emotional combatants strike, hover and withdraw from one another, at times with passion and elegance, at others with raw anger and brutality of language and posture. The dynamics between Ellis and Ray are largely compelling, with coercive control, emotional manipulation and palpable rage between them. Infidelity emerges in painful spurts, as individual past intimacies with the absent Kurt emerge. The energy bounces between them, with Kurt being the weapon that each wields. Their desperate anger and wilful, wounding spikes are artfully punctuated with mocking social commentary of the dogwalker “walking in a hazmat suit”.  The bittersweet “I miss believing you were worth obeying” chimes with the toxicity of the relationship, the parallels of close confinement and the rawness of characters and relationships that lockdown exposed for many.

As Edgar struggles with breathing and panic, the artful call back to George Floyd’s “I can’t breathe” is both poignant and powerful, yet is countered by Alice: “you don’t get to die mid pandemic!” Griffin allows us to fully engage with each character, the intimacy and vulnerability of power/submission and the pain of betrayal. The Dance of Death is to be witnessed and appreciated for its wit, the yearnings of wanting to be “seen, not owned” and the tenderness of the human condition.

Written, directed and produced by: Glenn T Griffin

The Dance of Death runs at The Libra Theatre Café until Saturday 28 June.