Theater Review: The Damned shocks with pre-Nazi German sociopathy

The Damned

Based on the work of Luchino Visconti, Nicola Badalucco, and Enrico Medioli

Directed by Ivo van Hove

Starring Christophe Montenez and Elsa Lepoivre

Le Comédie Française

Park Avenue Armory

July 28, 2018

This intense production of The Damned was the fourth production I have seen in the past few years by famed Belgian director Ivo van Hove. He takes lots of risks, and always displays a provocative visual style that tries to get to the emotional heart of his subject. The risks often pay off (a riveting View from the Bridge and Kings of War), but sometimes come across as interesting innovations that do not serve the play well (The Crucible).  Lately he has been adapting films for the stage (Network, Visconti’s Obsession), and this production was another of these efforts. The credits for this intense two-hour production oddly show no author; Van Hove “adapted” the play from the 1969 film The Damned by Luchino Visconti, but admittedly did not re-watch the movie in the year prior to the play’s debut at Avignon in 2016. So I think his authorship does go beyond simple adaptation, and that he should be credited with not just the look and sound of the play, but also the lines and dramatic flow. It was an intense experience, dominated by overwhelming audiovisual effects.

The Damned (subtitled Die Götterdammerung, the twilight of the Gods) recounts the decline and fall of the German von Essenbeck family in the years leading to WWII. Visconti’s movie was celebrated for its mix of German neurosis, repression, violence and decadence in portraying the downfall of these aristocrats. This is an aristocratic family built on a steel fortune, and, like many Germans, they felt their established fortune and influence would triumph over the vulgarity of Hitler. They were wrong, of course, and during the play, the family onstage shrinks, gradually migrating to 10 stage-left coffins in a series of death processions. The interesting thing is that while a few of them are killed as part of Nazi purges, others are killed by each other. The family matches the depravity of the state with its own dysfunction and sociopathy, making for a more complex drama. The drama as portrayed by von Hove is frankly Shakespearean, beginning with a Lear scenario of the family patriarch naming an heir and disinheriting another son, who eventually is betrayed by his sister in law and dies in a concentration camp.  Later we meet a widowed in-law wife scheming and murdering to achieve fortune for her lover and her son, á la Lady Macbeth. If anything, the play was less sexual and decadent than the Visconti film. For example, Martin (an outstanding and beautiful Christophe Montanez), the young dissolute heir who gradually inherits the business and gradually falls into line with the Nazis, is shown in the film as an ambisexual child-molesting predator, violating his young male cousin and a Jewish servant girl. In this play, that decadence is reduced to some spiked heels and rhapsodizing about hot men.

The film’s (in)famous gay orgy scene where Hitler’s troops slaughter the fornicating SA troops at a hotel (The historic Night of the Long Knives) is shown in a pre-recorded video shot from above, rather like a Busby Berkeley dance number with naked soldiers, ritualizing the violence but diminishing its immediacy and shock. Mr. van Hove seems to take his subject a little more seriously than did Visconti. His shock effects are less extreme; he waits until the very end to truly lay it on us with a now establishment Nazi Martin stripping naked, dumping his family's ashes on top of himself, then firing a machine gun into the audience, an apt summary of the Germans' surrender to Hitlerism.

.The feel of this production was similar to Kings of War, von Hove’s 2016 amalgam of all of Shakespeare’s Henry and Richard plays. Common to these two productions was a striking modernist set, overwhelming sound effects (here even better in the cavernous echo chamber of the Armory), and extensive use of video. We see all the characters changing clothes stage right, complete with wardrobe makeup mirrors, and they are sometimes “interviewed” with camera closeups as they change. Black-clad cameramen with steady-cams were constantly onstage, getting closeups, following the action, even going outside onto Park Avenue when a mother sought her missing son (the reaction of a woman walking her dog outside was priceless).  The cameras even followed the dead into their coffins, as we chillingly watched them struggle to emerge from entombment.

The video creates a very different sort of play-going experience. What should you watch: characters on the large stage, the video projected behind them, or the translations from French on the projected supertitles? The required multitasking creates a very active and sometimes fatiguing audience experience, but that may be the point. This director has devised a creative way to use video to amplify intensity. It must be difficult for the actors, who need to both play “big” to a live theater audience in a large hall, but also “small” into a close-up camera as is done in movies and TV. In any case, the actors of the Comédie Française pulled it off with a fine sense of ensemble and intense commitment, despite the constant risk of being upstaged by the striking audiovisual effects. The Nazi theme song “Horst-Wessel-Lied” has never sounded more chilling and immediate when projected 360 degrees in the echo-y Armory in a recording by unison men. That evoked the Nazi era better than anything else I have experienced. Yet this music was ironically juxtaposed on the main score of a saxophone quartet playing the music that made Germany great: Schutz, Bach, Beethoven. The production thus sought to encapsulate the tragic inconsistency that has made German culture both the apex and nadir of our civilization. 

In the end The Damned was bracing, but felt like a two-hour collection of impressive and jolting shock effects and short vignettes rather than a relentless Shakespeare or O’Neill tragedy. Perhaps this is because it lacked a true author (again, von Hove lists himself as an “adaptor”). I sensed that he was caught between a truly new play and a film adaptation, so missed an opportunity for an even better play. When will the talented Mr. von Hove actually write a play of his own?