WHO but Strindberg would set a play about marriage in a converted military prison on an island known as Little Hell, and, if that weren’t enough, allow the monster wife repeatedly to call the vampire husband “devil” and “demon” and their appalled visitor to wonder if corpses are buried under the floor? It’s as if he was daring all involved in any production to reach down into bottomless misery, unfathomable hatred, darkness beyond darkness.

Well, his mad-eyed ghost should be delighted with Sean Matthias’s revival. Robert Jones has designed a living room that’s a great grey-green drum with rusty staircases leading to an iron-mesh walkway high in the flies, and comes complete with candles, murk and looming shadows.

And Ian McKellen, balefully partnered by a sour, wintry Frances de la Tour, draws on whatever powered his Macbeth and his Iago — and gives a performance to match each.

He’s Edgar, a captain who, as wife Alice keeps reminding him, should have made major. But his bitterness and malice can’t be explained just by that or by Strindberg’s hints of a painful background. The arrival of Alice’s cousin gives the play its plot and Edgar new opportunities. He needles Owen Teale’s fine, upstanding Kurt for divorcing his wife and losing his son while himself demonstrating precisely why divorce laws exist. Meanwhile, Alice does her sado-masochistic best to trap and manipulate Kurt sexually, turning a man made up to resemble the sane Strindberg into the not-so-sane Strindberg.

A grey-faced, bullet-headed McKellen lolls with his cigar, lurches about in grubby long-johns, and, most alarmingly, totters in dressed in military blue, helmet and a preposterous white plume. Maybe he misses the vanity that leads Kurt to say that Edgar’s credo is “I am, therefore there’s God”. But when he emits that weary snarl, or cackles sardonically, or lets rip with one of the cracks that pack Richard Greenberg’s bleakly funny translation, or glints hungrily as he plots cataclysm for Alice, you feel that awful emptiness of soul that could, I guess, be defined as the banality of evil.

He’s sick and may soon die, a prospect that superficially delights de la Tour’s memorably sullen, querulous Alice: “Oh good.” Yet you know she wouldn’t long survive what Kurt primly calls their love-hate relationship. They share so much: disdain for others, paranoia, a refusal to accept responsibility for their woes, mutual rage, and, at the end, a weird, melancholy tenderness. Strindberg called Dance of Death his best play. Last night I believed him.

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