If a single metaphor could speak for the career and life of Sweden's greatest playwright and author, it would be the following taken from one of his novels: "We were dancing on the edge of the volcano."

The volcano is August Strindberg's own married life with three wives, now peaceful and sublime, now harboring fire and catastrophe.

"Dance of Death," considered his greatest play, written exactly 100 years ago, is the ultimate comment on modern marriage written for the stage. Much of what we see in this play is autobiographical; and to give the playwright his due, he is as hard on himself as he is on the women in his life.

It is Strindberg's first marriage, in particular, that comes under fiendish scrutiny in the play. He began a passionate affair with a married woman when he was 26. Siri von Essen subsequently divorced her husband, a baron, and she and Strindberg were married. Despite two disadvantages (a complete lack of training and a pronounced Finnish accent), she had ambitions to become an actress. She realized this ambition and gave birth to four of Strindberg's children (the first died in childbirth).

In "Dance of Death" we see the married couple, Edgar and Alice, in searing argument over the allegation that Alice was forced by Edgar to give up her career on the stage. This play (which was the main inspiration to Edward Albee for his "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?") goes very deep into the motivations of ego in the male-female relationship. The bedroom, the dungeon, the living room, the courtroom -- they all merge into one in the kind of drama that could easily be taking place anywhere in the world in the year 2000.

When Strindberg and his first wife separated, the recriminations were deep and unrelenting. (In "Dance of Death" the couple use the children against each other.) Infidelities by both of them had been frequent, including at least one lesbian relationship for Siri. Nonetheless the children were awarded by the court to her, and Strindberg was crushed. He desperately desired home and family, even if he lacked the necessary continuity of devotion to sustain them.

He met his second wife, Frida Uhl, a young Austrian journalist, when he was in his early 40s. Their marriage lasted but a year. She walked out on him.

Perhaps the metaphor of the volcano is even too tranquil for the violent eruptions of temperament that visited them. Strindberg had been through a traumatic trial for blasphemy, of which he was acquitted, but it left him with a stigma that kept publishers at arms' length. He had experienced profound depression, a loss of faith in his religion, raging alcoholism (it was probably the absinthe he was addicted to that ruined his disposition and health). His career was shattered under the pillars of the community that he sought to provoke in his plays, novels and essays. Now his second marriage had ended, more as farce than tragedy.

Strindberg is often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The real affinities of design and execution, though, not to mention theme, are with the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, with erotic obsessions coursing close to the surface of their works. How far can you go with relationships and still maintain them? Can you push the people you love so relentlessly that, eventually, they will make a full circle and come back to you? These are questions posed by "Dance of Death" that many will see as still relevant in our own time.

Strindberg had intended to call the play "The Vampire." This is no doubt Munch's vampire: bloodsucking jealousy itself. Strindberg himself wrote that "love without jealousy is as unnatural as light without shade."

He was outrageous and iconoclastic, seeing upright society as a social ruse for mountebanks. He believed for most of his life, except for the atheist period that followed his trial, that the layers of propriety and inhibition are peeled off the faces of men and women by an angry God who punishes us before he forgives us.

Edgar and Alice are visited by her cousin Kurt. When Kurt, who has been in America, returns, he brings with him his newfound faith in goodness and forbearance, but he is thrown into the midst of the hell of their marriage. Can his faith stand up to such a brutal display of reality? Can good survive in the face of bare evil?

Strindberg's third marriage came not long after the completion of "Dance of Death." Like his first wife, his third, Harriet Bosse, was an actress. When they married, he was 52; she was 23. The kind of life envisioned by the two was disparate to the point of incompatibility, and the marriage lasted only three years, though the two continued to have intimate relations for some three years after the divorce.

Strindberg has come down in history as a woman-hater. Certainly there is much venom directed toward women in his works. Like virtually all men of his era he expected women to transform themselves into happy, dedicated mothers after the birth of their children.

And yet he did marry three extremely strong, independent and intriguing women, a tribute to his skill for choice if not to his ability to cope with their ambitions. He anticipates Freud in his emphasis on the subconscious and his understanding of the male and female sexual drives. He is a visionary in every sense of the word, though his countrymen recognized him as such only after he was safely (for them) in his grave.

August Strindberg died in 1912. Despite his wicked obsessions with jealousy and the demons that he barely kept at bay within himself, he left us with an expressed desire that somehow resembles optimism, when he wrote:

"I would like to take the whole mass of the universe in my hand and knead it into something more perfect, more permanent, more beautiful . . . would like to see all creation and every created being happy . . . born without pain, live without sorrow and die with quiet joy."