Theatre review: The Damned (Les Damnés)

The continuing demand for Ivo van Hove to collaborate with companies around the world led to this 2016 production for the Comédie-Française for which the director's love of filmmaker Luchino Visconti's work once again inspired him: This time van Hove and his regular team of collaborators adapt Visconti's film The Damned (now Les Damnés,) about a wealthy family imploding during the rise of the Nazis. In other words yes, in the latest instalment of "shows that couldn't be more Barbican if they tried," it's a French company's production of a Belgian director and Dutch creative team's adaptation of an Italian film about Germans. The story starts on the night of the burning of the Reichstag, an incident that almost overshadows the birthday party for Baron Joachim von Essenbeck (Didier Sandre.)

The patriarch of the Essenbeck steelworks fortune has so far resisted supporting the Nazis, but having realised the business is threatened if he doesn't appear to, he's appointed his brownshirt son Konstantin (Denis Podalydès) as VP.

Fearing for his life, Joachim's socialist son-in-law Herbert (Loïc Corbery) flees, but due to events that are, I won't lie, a bit vague but definitely some kind of Nazified, it's Joachim who soon ends up dead, with his grandson Martin (Christophe Montenez) inheriting the controlling share. The young heir appears to be a bit simple, effete and distracted, so a power struggle begins between Konstantin and Martin's stepfather Friedrich (Guillaume Gallienne) for control of the company. In fact Martin is a sociopathic, serial-killing paedophile, and while his mother Sophie (Elsa Lepoivre) schemes to get her new husband the top job, he's free to descend to ever darker places. It's a microcosm of what's happening to the world outside, as the family make gradual concessions to the Nazis while their power keeps growing.

Stylistically we're in familiar van Hove territory - the colour scheme of Jan Versweyveld's set and lighting might have incorporated some garish orange in with the usual black and white, but the onstage changing areas, stage divided into spaces with distinct purposes, and live steadicam following the actors both onstage and off are familiar, and particularly reminiscent of Network and All About Eve. Fortunately everything works together so well here that the feeling that van Hove and co tend to fall back too much on the same box of tricks doesn't really surface too much. An D'Huys' costumes are modern dress except when characters put on SS uniforms, a bit on-the-nose but it makes its point all the same. And Tal Yarden's video design mixes the live shots with pre-recorded moments, the odd piece of archive footage and scenes that often seem to start with the live feed from the stage but turn out to be a surreal, nightmarish kaleidoscope.

Surtitles provide a translation from French into English, and the size of the Barbican stage is a bit of an obstacle to telling the story, especially at the beginning: It might be easier if you're sitting centrally, but I was to the side of the Balcony, and with the translations appearing above the stage, captions introducing the main characters on the main screen upstage, and the actors themselves concentrated at the time in the changing area stage right, it was hard to know where to look, and I felt like I was missing a lot of important setup. Maybe not though - van Hove's storytelling seems to be even further from naturalism than usual here, and certainly the main thrust of the story comes across. It's hard not to know where things are going when six coffins line up stage left waiting for occupants; the production takes the title very literally as one by one the characters take their place in them, only for us to see them trapped in there and still suffering after death.

There's also an urn downstage that holds the ashes of those characters lost over the course of the play, next to a factory horn that sounds their deaths, and reminds us of the company that they were ultimately sacrificed for. The urn becomes significant right at the end as Montenez becomes the third actor in the play to get aFULL-FRONTAL MALE NUDITY ALERT!(and the back view's not bad either,) and also notable is Sébastien Baulain earlier in the evening (although as is probably well-enough documented by now, you'll always lose points with me for sporting the full plucked-chicken look on your downstairs, so Montenez wins this round for me.) Both nude scenes are... certainly expressionistic, and effectively disturbing.

But then this is a production that does consciously borrow from expressionism, albeit in a way that remains disctinctly and recognisably Ivo van Hove's. And while on one level The Damned is both a literal and metaphorical look at the dangers of turning a blind eye to the rise of extremism until it's too late, it's also a family tragedy, and that's the level on which it's most effective. I do still think it'll be exciting if and when van Hove dispenses with a lot of his trademark techniques and experiments with a new style entirely, but in the meantime those techniques come together here as well as they ever have to provide a naggingly disturbing evening.

The Damned (Les Damnés) by Luchino Visconti is booking until the 25th of June at the Barbican Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Jan Versweyveld.