by Mark Shenton

McKellen also starred in the Broadway production

Sir Ian McKellen returned to the West End stage in August Strindberg's Dance of Death on Tuesday. The production enjoyed a successful stint on Broadway despite opening only a week after the September 11 attacks.

A marriage in meltdown is a familiar dramatic theme, but no one has tackled the topic with as bruising, unsentimental and shocking candour as August Strindberg does in Dance of Death.

This bleakly brilliant, remorselessly riveting account of a couple locked together by hate rather than love, three months away from celebrating their silver anniversary together, finds them living uncomfortably in alternately resigned and combustible fury.

But it is a fury that keeps them alive, even as they wish for each other's death.

"He could die of this," says visitor Kurt when the husband, Edgar, is diagnosed as suffering from heart problems.

"Oh, thank God!", is his wife Alice's immediate reply.

Frances de la Tour is hard to beat

As played by Sir Ian McKellen, returning to the London stage for the first time in over five years, Edgar is a priggishly poisonous man whom Kurt characterises as the most arrogant man he has ever met, summing up his attitude with the phrase, "I am, therefore there's God."

But his wife Alice, played by Frances de la Tour, is little better, constantly demeaning his military status of being merely a captain and not making it to major, and likening him to manure - "that isn't even top grade", she adds.

Few English actresses can beat the melancholic, withering disdain that the brilliantly brittle and bitter de la Tour invests in such remarks.

As they parry and spar, with Kurt - a helpless Owen Teale - trapped unwittingly in the middle, you suddenly see where Edward Albee got the inspiration for his play Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or indeed where Coward's Private Lives might have come from, too.

Both McKellen and de la Tour have played these roles before, he in a 2001 Broadway revival opposite Helen Mirren, she some 20 years ago at Riverside Studios opposite Alan Bates.

But this time you feel they have truly met their match.

Highbrow

In the enveloping gloom of Jon Driscoll's deliberately dim lighting, played by flickering candlelight, the play and its players cast long shadows in an evening that is dark in every sense.

But Sean Mathias's production, played in Richard Greenberg's new adaptation, is also drolly and melancholically funny.

It is the sort of production you would expect to find at the National, and I mean that as a compliment.

It is terrific to find it, therefore, on Shaftesbury Avenue instead, raising the intellectual game of the commercial West End by a big stretch, but it is also going to be a tough sell there, the stellar casting notwithstanding.

It is hardly boulevard fare, and not an easy night out. It is, however, an extremely rewarding one.