 Judith is portrayed as a youthful vampire, and there is the sense that this family's cycle of "love-hatred" will go on and on.In its unsentimental, sometimes bleakly humorous treatment of a marriage gone diabolic, "The Dance of Death" looks forward to other contemporary dramatic treatments of matrimony.In "Play Strindberg", Friedrich Dürrenmatt condensed "The Dance of Death I" into a terse, brutal series of boxing rounds.