Pass the Salt, Dear. Now Let Me Look at That Cut. The swirling strains of discordant music in "The Dance of Death," August Strindberg's pitch-black drama of domestic strife, come through in muted tones in the new revival from the enterprising Red Bull Theater company that opened Thursday night at the Lucille Lortel Theater, directed by Joseph Hardy and starring Daniel Davis and Laila Robins. Where thundering chords denoting burning hatred and the throes of spiritual despair are indicated, we hear instead the thinner textures of a piano sonata, albeit one liberally laced with dissonance. There is, to be sure, a leavening vein of mordant humor in Strindberg's play, a prototypical drama of marital misery that today feels like a turn-of-the-20th-century Scandinavian template for Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Edgar (Mr. Davis), the captain of an artillery battery, and Alice (Ms. Robins), his wife of a very long quarter-century, rip into each other with a practiced and amusing relish as the play begins, on the latest of a series of unendurable evenings together that must somehow be endured. As with Mr. Albee's George and Martha, bickering for these two has become an art form at which both are supremely skilled, each knowing exactly where the open wounds are, and how to probe them to elicit the most pain. Their hatred for each other has also metastasized into a generalized alienation from virtually all the people in their orbit. Speaking of the locals in the vicinity of the island fortress they inhabit, Edgar dismisses them as a thoroughly bad lot. "They all betray us, my dear," he crisply observes. They're all traitors. Dross and scum. Edgar and Alice have sent their children away to school, after tiring of using them as cannon fodder in their ongoing war. Even the couple's servants are abandoning their employers to their mutual misery, providing Alice with a nice new piece of bitterness with which to badger her husband. She'll now have to soil her once-lovely hands - the hands of an actress who abandoned her career for this disappointing marriage - by cooking dinner. And without anything in the larder: Edgar's finances and faculties are becoming disorderly, and he has failed to keep track of the grocery bills. This becomes a matter of some mortification when Alice's cousin Gustav (Derek Smith) turns up to pay his respects, having acquired a job as an officer at the quarantine hospital. Poor Gustav soon finds himself quarantined in the poisonous chamber where Alice and Edgar circle and taunt each other, and he becomes a prized pawn in their increasingly violent games. Mike Poulton's adaptation reduces the cast of characters to just three, eliminating three small roles and also changing the name of the character Kurt to Gustav, for whatever reason. With his rich, sonorous voice, precise elocution and markedly Anglicized accent, Mr. Davis seems the very model of the classically trained British actor, which is all the more impressive since he was born in Arkansas and acquired his classical facility on this continent. He infuses Edgar with an imperious insistence on his own dignity that makes his sudden lapses into a near-catatonic state all the more piteous. Mr. Davis, known to many for his role as the butler on "The Nanny" (whence he may have acquired an affinity for plummy tones), expertly draws out the deliciously mocking humor in Edgar's malice, too. And yet, like many British actors of the "just speak the lines dear boy" school, Mr. Davis delivers a performance that's impeccable on the surface but fails to draw forth the deeper layers of anguish that underlie Edgar's querulousness. "The Dance of Death" is a study in the horror of life's spiritual isolation - the loneliness that unhappy intimacy with another only accentuates. Unless Edgar's inward agony cuts cleanly through the surface of his bitterness, the evening adds up to little more than an exhausting battle of warped wits. Elegantly turned out in costume designer Alejo Vietti's period dresses, Ms. Robins makes an expert sparring partner, as Alice meets each of Edgar's vicious sallies with her own ample artillery of resentments and insults. But like Mr. Davis, she rarely infuses the proceedings with the dark intensity that could wake us up to the drama's truly harrowing aspects. The lilting insouciance with which she describes her misery to Gustav is often funny. Giving a précis of the years since they met, Ms. Robins's Alice says dryly: "What is there to tell? All my life I've been incarcerated here. It used to be a prison you know. He's my jailer - a man I've always despised. My life's sentence is to hate him until the day he dies. Then I'll dance on his grave. Similarly grotesque sentiments are expressed repeatedly - almost ceaselessly it seems - throughout "Dance of Death." If they come across merely as malicious repartee, the play's power to unsettle us with its brutal vision of life as a torture chamber built for two remains theoretical. Mr. Davis and Ms. Robins are both fine actors (as is Mr. Smith, who does what he can with a mostly thankless role), and they are hardly the first talented team to fail to excavate the play's full emotional depths. The last Broadway version, an overscale production starring the formidable pair of Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, also had a hollow feeling about it, and previous Broadway productions, with the equally impressive duos of Viveca Lindfors and Rip Torn (in 1971), and Zoe Caldwell and Robert Shaw (in 1974), together played a total of 42 performances. Perhaps Strindberg's play is so disturbing to perform that actors instinctively retreat from its poisonous depths, preferring to present us with an Edgar and Alice who play at agony instead of truly suffering it. I'm not sure I can really blame them. The Dance of Death By August Strindberg, newly adapted by Mike Poulton; directed by Joseph Hardy; sets by Beowulf Boritt; costumes by Alejo Vietti; lighting by Clifton Taylor; sound by Brandon Wolcott; associate director, Craig Baldwin; production stage manager, April Ann Kline; production supervisor, B D White. Presented by Red Bull Theater, Jesse Berger, artistic director; Evan O'Brient, managing director; by special arrangement with the Lucille Lortel Theater Foundation. At the Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street, West Village, (212) 352-3101, redbulltheater.com. Through May 4. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. WITH: Daniel Davis (Edgar), Laila Robins (Alice) and Derek Smith (Gustav).