[Below, Spencer offers a review of the production of The Dance of Death at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, directed by David Hunt.]

What a tremendous terrifying play The Dance of Death (1900) is. And how terrific to see a regional theatre staging Strindberg—a dramatist usually regarded as box-office poison—with such passion, commitment and shockingly black humour.

Strindberg discovered long before Jean-Paul Sartre that hell is other people. On the evidence of this play—one of his most autobiographical—he was also a nightmare houseguest. After one of his periodic bouts of insanity, Strindberg sought refuge with his sister, Anna, who had given up her career as a violinist to marry Hugo Philp, a teacher. Strindberg being Strindberg, he naturally fancied his sister, and before long developed an intense hatred for her unexceptionable husband. He responded to his relations' hospitality by storming out of the house and writing The Dance of Death in a state of boiling rage. When the traduced Philp began to read it, he threw the manuscript on the fire.

At least Strindberg had the grace to disguise the characters. The married couple here are Edgar, captain of a remote artillery battery on a Swedish island, and his wife, Alice, who abandoned her career as an actress to marry him. They cordially loathe each other, and have sent their children to boarding school for fear they will be infected by the poisonous rancour of the household.

We discover them one evening, sitting yards apart, attempting to fill the yawning hours of yet another miserable night at home. Then Alice's poor sap of a cousin arrives as the island's newly appointed quarantine officer, and becomes disastrously involved in the couple's marital slugfest.

It's like watching two snakes trying to devour the same rabbit—horrible but absolutely fascinating.

Mike Poulton's sparky, four-lettered new version, which often seems like a forerunner of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, wisely offers only the first part of the play. Part two was almost certainly an afterthought, and is a pale and sentimental shadow of its vicious predecessor. In this initial salvo you get Strindberg at his most intemperate, burning with rancid rancour and illicit desire.

In David Hunt's magnificent production, the autumn wind never stops howling and the couple's marital quarters, imaginatively designed by Michael Vale, seem to occupy a warzone, complete with fractured reinforced concrete and a gaping hole in the back wall.

Watching the battling couple, I longed to know where a woman's sympathies would lie. Gregory Floy's Captain may be a coldly calculating brute, but he is also a brute with style. He copes with a possibly terminal sickness with fortitude, and the sheer audacity of his wickedness in the second half is breathtaking (and Poulton has added a devastating final twist of his own).

In contrast, Christine Absalom's Alice is hideously and unforgettably repellent. Plain and overweight, she carps constantly, treats the servant abominably, rejoices in her husband's illness, and deploys her vilely manipulative sexuality like an offensive weapon. As she comes on strong to Ignatius Anthony's hilariously embarrassed and bewildered Gustav, you feel a great shudder of revulsion. No wonder Strindberg is so often perceived as a misogynist.

But what makes both play and production great, as well as vastly entertaining in the nastiest possible way, is the revelation that Edgar and Alice don't just hate each other. Somewhere, deep down, they love each other too, and that love is even more frightening than their hatred.