Last night Stuart and I went to see Third Reich thriller The
Damned (Les Damnes) at the Barbican Theatre in London's glitzy Barbican Centre.
International theatre's most in-demand auteur is directing
the legendary Comédie-Française company in his adaptation of Luchino Visconti's
1969 film The Damned. Yes, Ivo van Hove, perhaps the world’s most in-demand
theatre director, who has only just launched his production of All About Eve in
the West End, is back at the Barbican.
With a company of 30 actors and technicians, prominent use
of live and recorded film, it was another epically ambitious and technically
impressive production on the Barbican stage, performed in French with English
surtitles.
Van Hove is, by now, as well known for his penchant for
reworking classic films by the likes of Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Billy
Wilder and, indeed Visconti, having previously adapted 1949's Obsession, which
played at the Barbican with Jude Law in 2017.
The story, harrowing and contemporarily relevant, concerns a
prominent German industrialist family, the Essenbecks, who reluctantly become
complicit Nazi colluders as the regime gradually gains power. It deals with the
disintegration of society, morality, and the grand questions familiar to Greek
and Shakespearian tragedy, in a way that van Hove clearly believes speaks to
our time.
Each death in the dynasty is accompanied by a loud blast on
an industrial whistle and a burial of the body in an onstage coffin. A video of
the dead is then projected on to a screen at the back of the stage giving us an
unnerving view of the corpse dying all over again.
A powerful play (film?) that shows a family inexorably
destroyed by its complicity with a an evil tyranny.
The show only runs for five nights. Which doesn't surprise
me. At 2 hours 10 mins with no interval the actors must be knackered.
I support you, this quotation has a profound sense
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