Frances de la Tour and Sir Ian McKellen: Deadly double act

Frances de la Tour and Sir Ian McKellen are currently lighting up the West End with their scintillating and very funny portrayal of the marriage from hell in Strindberg's Dance of Death. Paul Taylor meets the two actors in a bid to discover the secret of their chemistry

It's teatime, and indeed cups of tea are about to be served. But the setting is a little incongruous. We're in the spookily deserted bar of the Lyric Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue and, while we wait for Ian McKellen to arrive, I appear to be whiling away the time by treating Frances de la Tour to a discourse on the degrees of life expectancy you encounter in different types of married couples. In her roles on stage and screen, this great actress's large brown eyes and elegant basset-hound face seem permanently to brim on the cusp of comic subversiveness. Off stage, too, there's always a latent amusement – as there is now. I venture the thought that it's paradoxically the surviving partners from deeply loving marriages who tend, after a decent interval, to get a second lease of life – either remarrying or enjoying a power surge in their career. Think of John Bayley and Iris Murdoch or Judi Dench and Michael Williams.

"Or Paul and Linda McCartney," De la Tour adds shrewdly. "You mean a marriage based on real love as opposed to need." That's right: one where you want what is best for your partner because you honour their otherness. She finishes the thought for me, "And it's where couples are entwined in love-hate that they die in quick succession." This line of argument was provoked by a conversation I overheard in the interval at the first night of the magnificent production, directed by Sean Mathias and starring Frances de la Tour and Ian McKellen, of Strindberg's Dance of Death. The show, a big hit critically and commercially, is currently one of the very few good deeds in the West End. It also thrillingly demonstrates that Dance of Death, written in 1900 at the brink of the new century, was the seminal play of that era.

The conversation that I eavesdropped on during the interval was between two women. They were speculating about what kind of man De la Tour's character might move on to after her husband's seemingly imminent demise. A more pertinent question would be: just how much time would she have left in those circumstances? With riveting, blackly hilarious rapport, McKellen and De la Tour play the co-dependent couple from hell – a Captain and his wife, a former actress. Bilious with the lack of a social life, they have turned to (and on) one another with a vampire-like verve. They are the life – and death – of each other's party. If their telepathic games of mutual recrimination stopped, so would they. We are just agreeing on this when Ian McKellen arrives, looking a good decade younger than his 62 years and with his hair close-cropped for the part of the Captain – a dog who never really had his day. It's intriguing that many of McKellen's great successes have been portraits of screwed-up military types (Iago, Richard III, Macbeth) who grow warped because they simply can't get the hang of the rules and arts of peace.

"You don't need to know Swedish to be able to guess from the original text that there are large sections that are a kind of music-hall patter – lots of short lines," McKellen announces. Mathias's production brilliantly goes for broke in that direction, It understands that lacerating laughter is the only adequate response to a situation that is, on any rational reckoning, extraordinarily depressing – and that this is not an imposition on the play but a tribute to its deepest insight. Jokes, Strindberg recognises, can be more painful than pain. Tragedy falsely dignifies the human race, by pretending to a self-important closure that can never be attained. Strindberg's comedy is a ceaseless, exhausting, ever-failing attempt to outwit humiliation – life as a hamster wheel of fearful fun.

If you were to subject the couple in Dance of Death to time-lapse photography, you would see how readily they would morph into other high-profile pairs from 20th-century drama. These range from Elyot and Amanda in Private Lives (Strindberg is habitually branded a misogynist, but it's significant how – just like Noël Coward – he tends to give women the upper hand in the sex war) to George and Martha and their marital games in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (the greatest act of creative homage yet committed to the earlier play) to Samuel Beckett (stick Strindberg's couple in a set of matching dustbins and much of the dialogue and the basic situation would be indistinguishable). Sean Mathias had the inspired notion of commissioning a translation from the US dramatist Richard Greenberg, who had a hit here last year at the Donmar Warehouse with the homosexuality-in-baseball play Take Me Out. His witty, canny version of the Strindberg alerts you to the drama that it influenced. As McKellen points out, the gallows-humour speech, such as the Captain's "Six and eight is 15... Arithmetic also vanished!" is pure Beckett avant la lettre.

I wondered, though, about pre-echoes of the play. Frances de la Tour confirms a hunch I'd had. "In Shakespeare, it's Antony and Cleopatra," says the actress who memorably performed the Serpent of Old Nile with Alan Bates for the RSC. "Both couples 'perform' their love and they seem to operate better with an audience." As with Shakespeare, she argues, you have to act Strindberg "on the line": there's not much point in trying to work out a back-story for your character. Both she and McKellen reveal that one difficulty with this work is keeping it distinct from Ibsen and Chekhov. You can get too detailed, when what is really required is the kind of brush-stroke where, in painting, say, you can see on the canvas the hairs of the brush.

McKellen is a Bolton boy, as are two of our best drama critics: Eric Bentley and Irving Wardle. In a recent book dedicated to Wardle, Bentley makes the excellent point that Ibsen now seems dated by comparison with Strindberg. Enlightened legislation might ameliorate the situation in A Doll's House, but you could not frame laws that would bring an end to the primal biological battles dramatised by Strindberg. I try out this perception on the two actors. "I really like the fact that he doesn't moralise," comments De la Tour.

Towards the end of the conversation, I perform a duty that I have been dreading all the way through. I ask McKellen for an autograph – or, rather, I ask for the signature of Gandalf, his character from the Lord of the Rings movies. My children are as immune as I am to charms of Tolkien, and Sir Ian has been quoted as saying that it's like making a home movie (and we all know how great that is). But the best friend of one of my daughters is a Tolkien freak and has a birthday coming up. McKellen takes command of the card I hand him, using up the whole inside space with what looks from my upside-down angle like a swift self-portrait in a few dexterous lines. He then addresses and seals the envelope.

As he shows me out, he takes me on stage. The curving set of the tower where the couple are under self-imposed house arrest rhymes beautifully with the curves of the Lyric Theatre, giving a sensation of extraordinary intimacy. "It's more naturalistic than the set we had when I did the play in New York. We realised that the symbolism of the play works better if, visually, it's rooted in reality." McKellen and De la Tour evidently love one another. During the interview, they often hang on to one another in a manner that is over and above a show of actorly solidarity or coping with the stress of meeting me. Such is the diabolic telepathy of their rapport in this play that you would swear that they had been performing together for years, like some high-art version of the Lunts. In fact, Dance of Death is their very first joint venture. Let's hope it is not their last. Any producer worth his or her salt would realise that the Ian and Frankie show should be kept on the road.

'Dance of Death' is at the Lyric Theatre, London W1 (0870 890 1107) to 7 June