The Dance of Death: Full Text and Introduction

By August Strindberg

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price
Strindberg's chilling anatomy of a marriage - in which the two partners duel with each other until one is utterly defeated.
Edgar and Alice, embittered husband and wife, live on an army base on a Swedish island. Alice calls it 'Little Hell', and it's about to get worse.
Written in 1900 and consisting of two full-length plays, August Strindberg's The Dance of Death is full of destruction and bitterness, laced with grim humour. Both parts are included in this volume – though usually only the first is staged.
This version of The Dance of the Death in Nick Hern Books' Drama Classics series is translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Oct 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788502436

August Strindberg

August Stringberg was a novelist, poet, playwright, and painter, and is considered to be the father of modern Swedish literature, publishing the country’s first modern novel, The Red Room, in 1879. Strindberg was prolific, penning more than 90 works—including plays, novels, and non-fiction—over the course of his career. However, he is best-known for his dramatic works, many of which have been met with international acclaim, including The Father, Miss Julie (Miss Julia), Creditors, and A Dream Play. Strindberg died in 1912 following a short illness, but his work continues to inspire later playwrights and authors including Tennessee Williams, Maxim Gorky, and Eugene O’Neill.

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Reviews for The Dance of Death

[gingerbreadman_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Edgar and Alice, the married couple bound together by hate, love and guilt, staging their war before the necessary witness Kurt are a classic threesome in theatre, inspiring many successors. Martha and George and their young night guests are but one flagrant example. We’re planning a staging of part one of this play at my theatre, as a part of the hundred year anniversary of Strindberg’s death, and I needed to reread it. I took the opportunity to read the much more seldom staged second part, while I had the first part fresh. Like always, Strindberg writes a rather heavyhanded, almost crude, dialogue. His strength is in the passion and the misogyny, rather than in structure or finesse. This theme, being a vampire on someone else’s misery suits him fine. At times though, there are way too many exclamation points and pathetic outbursts for me, even taking the heightened style of the play into account.The volume I read, part of an annotated collected works, also has a comment section at the end. It’s the kind you need to be a fanatic or the writer’s mother to enjoy, full of endless accounts of early mentions of minor characters in Strindberg’s occult diary or how many minutes were cut in the Köln production 1905.