Dance of Death

Richard Eyre is a theatre director, writer, and former artistic director of the National Theatre (a position he held from 1988 to 1997). He worked for ten years in regional theatre in Leicester, Edinburgh, and Nottingham, and then became producer of BBC TV's Play for Today. In London, his theatre work as an adapter includes his versions of Jennifer Dawson's novel The Ha Ha, Sartre's Les Mains Sales, and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Ghosts at the Almeida Theatre and the West End. His original play, The Snail House, was staged at Hampstead Theatre in 2022. What follows is a selection of directorial credits: for the National Theatre, Guys and Dolls, Hamlet, King Lear, Sweet Bird of Youth, John Gabriel Borkman, and Liolà. For the West End, Marry Poppins, The Last Cigarette, Mr. Foote's Other Leg, and The Pajama Game. And on Broadway, The Crucible and Private Lives. His opera work includes La traviata at the Royal Opera House; Manon Lescaut at the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus; Carmen, Werther, and Le nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera.

His film and television work includes The Imitation Game, Tumbledown, The Ploughman's Lunch, Iris, Notes on a Scandal, and Changing Stages (a six-part look at twentieth-century theatre which he wrote and presented), among others. He has published several books, including National Service, a journal of his time at the National Theatre, which won the Theatre Book Prize; and What Do I Know?, a collection of essays about people, politics, and the arts. He has received many awards for theatre, television and film, was knighted in 1997, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011.

August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter. His plays include The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), The Dance of Death (1900), A Dream Play (1902), and The Ghost Sonata (1908).