There will be, I suspect, two audiences attending Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of the screenplay Nicola Badalucco, Enrico Medioli and Luchino Visconti wrote for Visconti’s stately 1969 film, The Damned—one audience much larger than the other. The larger is likely to include theatergoers who’ve never seen the 49-year-old movie, the smaller those who have seen it. There are probably yet two more groups—those who have seen neither the Visconti opus nor a previous van Hove production and those who’ve witnessed both.
Since I’m among the latter crowd on two counts, I need to note that I watched The Damned, now at the Park Avenue Armory, in comparison with Visconti’s original. I can say that Visconti’s screen version, set as the Nazis come to power in 1933, is akin to the visual elegance with which he composed all his films. In his turn, Van van Hove has done what he normally does when uncorking his take on a classic—or a property verging on a classic: He strips away anything he regards as superficial to the basic text and sticks to the basic text, sometimes even exposing the subtext.
So whereas Visconti is always masterfully filmic, van Hove is as blatantly theatrical as the traffic will allow. And the traffic here allows plenty that the acting troupe of the Comédie Française (for whom van Hove mounted this production) can do to heighten the theatricality. (One heightening aspect is that the actors wear body mics in the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall. I suspect they didn’t in the intimate Theatre de la Comédie Française.)
How theatrical does van Hove wax? For starters, he sends his troupe out, drill-like (right for the Drill Hall, no?), to stand, wearing street clothes, on an empty stage and in ranks facing the audience. He then disperses them to a row of light-bulb-bright dressing tables where those in the opening scenes gussy themselves up. (Jan Versweyveld is credited with scenography and lighting designs, as he usually is on van Hove works.) The director also dispenses camerapersons to video troupe members for a sizable upstage screen on which he’s often able to show movie-like close-ups. (Perhaps this is in homage to Visconti.)
At other times—and frequently accompanied by a high-volume clang from original sound designer and sound concept creator Eric Sleichim—van Hove has the Drill Hall house lights come up as the troupe once again assembles in ranks before the audience. And in what has become a theatrical cliché, he has cast members sit on the periphery when not either in the scenes or prepping to be in the scenes.
So all of the extreme theatricality is in service to what?: To a strongly intentioned political statement from Visconti-Badalucco-Medioli about a fabulously rich German steel-industrial family called von Essenbeck. Although patriarch Baron Joachim von Essenbeck (Didier Sandre) has attempted to keep his distance from the rising National Socialists and their leader, Adolf Hitler, he has seen fit to have one sympathizer among his administrators, Herbert Thallman (Loic Corbery).
Since the von Essenbecks downfall designates them as the titular damned, their damnation begins when military men arrive to arrest Herbert. He escapes, leaving behind now-tainted wife Elisabeth (Adeline d’Hermy) and young daughters Erika (Madison Cluzel) and Thilde (Gioia Benenati). Also left behind is daughter-in-law Baronne Sophie von Essenbeck (Elsa Lepoivre), whose husband is deceased and whose motives throughout hint at the sinister.
Also adding to the histrionics is Sophie’s son Martin von Essenbeck (Christophe Montenez). There’s also Gunther (Clément Hervieu-Léger), whose father is Baron Konstantin von Essenbeck (Denis Podalydés). He’s snuffed early in the proceedings. And then Sophie’s lover Friedrich Bruckmann (Guillaume Gallienne), whom Sophie is manipulating to be the next von Essenbeck mogul, and officer Wolf von Aschenbach (Eric Génovese), whose intentions for the industrial family are vague, are the other focal figures. (N.B.: Wolf von Aschenbach is not the Gustav von Aschenbach of Visconti’s—and Thomas Mann’s—superb Death in Venice.)
Warning: I think I have the above relationships right, but maybe I shouldn’t swear to it, since much of the goings-on in The Damned are confusing as the society cracks and crumbles. Just who is who is often confounding, though I’d say those problems are more attributable to Visconti and his collaborators than to van Hove and his. Indeed, as the von Essenbecks slowly decline, van Hove stays devotedly close to the movie dialogue.
And “slowly” may be the operative word. Despite the often frenzied action, the inevitable family disintegration feels as if it’s talking an awfully long time. One contribution to the attenuated sense is a particularly extended sequence in which German army officers celebrate drunkenly, rip off their uniforms and cavort until they’re assassinated. Two of these fully-frontal celebrants go through their gyrations live; many others are shown on screen.
Incidentally, one of the live pair, when shot to death, has a bucket of blood—or what’s substituted for blood—poured over him, recalling the blood shower van Hove imposed more successfully at the end of his A View From the Bridge revisal.
Writing this review, I’m wondering whether it’s clear whether or not I go for this version of The Damned. While I admire van Hove’s theatricality, I find it insufficiently effective for a full endorsement of his take on a film about which I already have reservations.
By the way, there often are properties that signal they won’t end until something specific is accomplished. It might be a working clock that, it’s been indicated, must reach a certain time—midnight, say. Or take Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother, which can’t top out until an announced suicide takes place. With The Damned, it’s six coffins lying on a raised stage-left platform. Until six corpses—metaphorically standing for the death of pre-Third Reich Germany—have the coffin lids closed on them, it’s not yet lights out for the production.
It may be that spectators in addition to this one will eventually realize they’re watching those unfilled coffins too longingly.
The Damned opened Tuesday, July 17, 2018, at the Park Avenue Armory and runs to July 28. Tickets and information: armoryonpark.org
