Newsnight Review discussed Ian McKellen in Strindberg's marital battle Dance Of Death.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

GERMAINE GREER:
One of the reasons I am a feminist is this play. I can't remember when I first read it, but I can remember the first time I saw it, in a student production at Cambridge. I was so staggered by the intensity of its depiction of how two people, who can't escape from each other, can drag each other into a vortex of misery and rage that turns out to be the only energy they have. It's really about a symbiosis they can't escape from. And there's also this other thing, that there is a man in the play who escaped from it. There is Kurt, who left his wife, for whom Edgar and probably Alice have nothing but contempt. It's curious. It's often presented as a misogynistic play, and it really isn't, because the great villain is the captain himself, who is a vampire. It's a truly tragic, archetypal expressionist play.

IAN HISLOP:
It certainly didn't work. There were some early jokes, so you were given the impression this might be a lighter piece, and then suddenly you got the full, "We are a devil," and everyone starts behaving in the most melodramatic manner possible after it being very naturalistic. I was vaguely with it and I thought, "What are they doing now?" I didn't actually believe it. I had the feeling that late 19th, early 20th century assault on the tyranny of marriage, the Chekhovian gloom put in the Strindberg, is not relevant any more. It struck me as dated. Edward Albee said he was influenced by Strindberg, but actually Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a much better play. I didn't know why it was revived.

MARK KERMODE:
In the first half, they have gone for the laughs, and Sir Ian McKellen is chewing up the scenery, getting laughs out of lines which I would never have thought would be that funny. But the problem is that it makes the hatred between the couple funny. It's not that they genuinely hate each other. They are just sparking off each other. There were gales of laughter in the audience. When you get into the second half, which requires you to go into the inner depths of hell, it completely doesn't work. They have managed to make the first half entertaining, but vacuous. I have no problem with that. But the second half, therefore, becomes this completely redundant foot note in which there is a lot of metaphysical breast beating to no purpose whatever. But I still think the laughs at the beginning - everyone has complained about the poster, which is them smiling happily that represents the first two-thirds of the play. It's the last bit that didn't work.

LAWSON:
Strindberg would have liked the idea that next door is My Brilliant Divorce. He knew Monk and thought the Scream was a bit too jolly. Strindberg was a deeply gloomy man, but they do get jokes out of this.

GREER:
I don't care whether they get jokes out of it. That's not the point. You have to understand the style of the thing. It's expressionist. It isn't to be played in this apparently realistic fashion, except it seems to be the case now that, if you do anything on the stage, you have to have a huge staircase that costs a lot of money that nobody uses! Here was this action dominated by the staircase, and at one stage that old lady character floated on. The ghostly character. Madness.

HISLOP:
Maybe the expressionism doesn't work.

LAWSON:
It's about seeing Sir Gandalf that's why people are turning up.

GREER:
Only because the English, for years, have thought of acting as impersonation, and the further you are from the person you are playing, the more astonished people are that you are playing it. So the theatrical night, there is a great imitation of someone dying of arteriosclerosis, which is irrelevant.

HISLOP:
He doesn't imitate anyone he comes on as Sir Ian McKellen.

GREER:
But there is no Sir Ian McKellen. It's all the mannerisms.