Edgar and Alice are isolated on a remote island and imprisoned in a toxic marriage. He, an artillery captain, has no friends, few pleasures and no inclination to socialise with the ‘scum’ and ‘scoundrels’ that make up the other residents of the island. She, a former actress, despises him for ending her career, ‘eradicating’ her family and forcing her to live with him in seclusion. Their silver wedding anniversary looms – ‘twenty-five years of misery’ – but he is more concerned about his weak heart and she with her deepening despair. Then Alice’s cousin Kurt pays a visit and provides relief as a go-between to husband and wife – that is until he becomes caught in the crossfire of their war of attrition.

August Strindberg’s play from 1900, The Dance of Death, is a darkly compelling study of marital strife. It is one of the Swedish master’s chamber plays: an intense, tightly-focused drama featuring two or three characters. On the surface it also seems to be another of Strindberg’s great naturalistic works. One of the ways he achieved this was by sourcing his material from real-life incidents and experiences. As he once declared: ‘A writer is only a reporter of what he has lived.’ Miss Julie (1888), which he subtitled ‘A Naturalistic Tragedy’, depicted an illicit affair between an aristocratic woman and her father’s servant. The Father (1887) was about a deteriorating marriage. For these plays he drew on aspects of his own relationships, both the initial thrill and the final death throes. The characters in The Dance of Death were based on Strindberg’s fiercely argumentative sister and her husband. As Strindberg’s biographer Sue Prideaux puts it: ‘Her idea of happiness was to fight; her idea of misery, submission.’

The Dance of Death can be viewed as grittily realistic. In some respects, it feels like a companion piece to The Father, albeit one that centres not so much upon a deteriorating marriage as a moribund one. However, the play also operates on a symbolic level by way of its dialogue, location and characters. Strindberg concocts a world in which a sequestered husband and wife assume roles, impart warped truths and are condemned to torment each other until eternity on their sealed-off island, in their impregnable fortress and in their interminable marriage.

Richard Eyre’s new production of the play at London’s Orange Tree Theatre expertly captures both its naturalistic qualities and its allegorical flourishes. The veteran writer and director is no stranger to Scandinavian drama: his versions of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Little Eyolf and Ghosts at the Almeida Theatre were critically acclaimed. Eyre’s take on Strindberg sees him making choice alterations to the original script – or, as he terms it, indulging in ‘a little spring-cleaning’. He sets the play in 1918, against the backdrop of the Spanish Flu epidemic, thus heightening the claustrophobia of living in close confines under quarantine and reinforcing the notion of pervading death. He fleshes out the characters by enhancing their backstories. He also updates the language, turning Strindberg’s mild oaths into fiery expletives.

At the outset, Ashley Martin-Davis’ set and John Leonard’s soundtrack lull us into a false sense of security. The stage is enclosed by friezes of sea and sky in soft blues. In the background, waves roll and seagulls cry. But as the play unfolds and Peter Mumford’s lighting is reduced to dim glows from scattered lamps, the successive scenes are rendered more discomfiting. Violent gusts of wind throw open doors and bang them shut. Alice plays frantic marches on the piano while Edgar performs a manic danse macabre. The furniture hems everyone in and occasionally serves as obstacles.

All three actors fully embody their characters and create a growing sense of unease. Some actors make the mistake of playing Edgar as a one-dimensional tyrant. But Strindberg has Alice describe her husband as ‘a bully with the soul of a slave’. Will Keen, who previously starred in Eyre’s production of Ghosts, expertly brings out Edgar’s tyrannical side as he stomps around the room in his army uniform, bellowing orders and insults, or brandishing and thrusting his sword to make a point or a threat. But he also displays Edgar’s vulnerable side, shrugging off all military bearing when slumping in a chair to brood or slip into a torpor, or when collapsing in a heap on the floor. Elsewhere Keen makes manifest more of Edgar’s contradictions. This is a character who, on the one hand, is so bored of his wife and so tired of life that he craves death. ‘The day I am allowed to die is the day I will be happy,’ he announces to Kurt. On the other hand, as his heart condition worsens, he swaps his sword for a walking stick and begins to fret about his demise.

Lisa Dillon gives an equally nuanced performance as Alice. She shows defiance and resilience in every bout. She calls Edgar a cannibal and vampire and says he dances like a banshee – while she screams like one. Dillon is also adept at sliding from one extreme emotion to another. We get hot-blooded anger (‘When he dies, I’ll dance on his corpse’); agonised frustration (‘we’re welded together and can’t break free’); deep-seated contempt (‘Do you know why he’s afraid of dying? He’s afraid I’ll remarry’); and heartfelt sorrow, especially when ruminating on the loss of her children: two have died and the other two have been sent to the mainland, out of their parents’ harmful orbit. Dillon later rises to the challenge of presenting Alice asserting dominance over Kurt by ordering him to lie on the floor and kiss her feet.

As the visitor in the ménage and the third wheel in the relationship, Kurt, in the wrong hands, could be the weak link in the production. Fortunately, Geoffrey Streatfeild excels at portraying Alice’s long-lost cousin as a diffident outsider who looks on in bafflement and then in horror at the chaos and cruelty unleashed before him. ‘You’re a devil’, he says to Alice in a trance, finally realising Edgar isn’t the only diabolical presence in the house. He isn’t the only ‘vampire’ either. Streatfeild elicits gasps of shock as his character, mad with pent-up lust, throws himself on Alice and, as Strindberg has it, ‘bites her throat’.

All of which sounds like a three-hander of unremitting grimness. Admittedly, there are moments when the characters appear to wallow in darkness. Dillon spends most of the time in black, her dress and shawl resembling widow’s weeds in anticipation of death; towards the end, Keen utters one of Edgar’s bleakest, and most defeatist lines: ‘Perhaps when death comes, life begins.’ Yet like that other great play about malice in marriage, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, occasional streaks of caustic humour appear to lighten the mood and ensure the characters are not entirely mired in gloom. Dillon exhibits deft comic timing when Alice highlights Edgar’s flaws with a series of sharp put-downs, or when she racks her brains and airily asks Edgar, ‘Do we know any happy people?’ Dillon gets the biggest laugh of the night in the scene where Edgar takes a tumble and lies motionless on the floor – her anguish that he might be dead curdling into annoyance as it dawns on her that he is tragically still alive.

This is a bravura revival of a play that is difficult to get right. Eyre achieves the perfect balance and his cast brilliantly conveys what Edgar terms ‘a match made in hell’. The small venue with front-row seating on and around the stage makes for an intimate theatrical experience. It is hard not to be transfixed watching these characters slug it out and grind each other down, till death them do part.

Dance of Death will be performed at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond until 7 March.