“Les Damnés”/“The Damned” by Comédie Française, directed by Ivo van Hove.

Seen at Barbican Theatre 19 June 2019.

    [I have to admit I still haven’t done my homework and haven’t seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1969 “The Damned/Götterdämmerung” on which this play is based, but, upon seeing “Les Damnés” the main cinematic association for me were Michael Haneke’s recent films such as “Happy End” and “White Ribbon” for the sense of a collapse of a powerful family and a certain world order and the doomed energy of the pent-up anger of the young. Although these scenes must have been conceived by van Hove and Haneke roughly at the same time, the young Martin von Essenbeck (the brilliant Cristophe Montenez)’s song performance in the opening of “Les Damnés” reminded me of Pierre Laurent (Franz Rogowski)’s karaoke dance in its desperate anticipation of a life about be wasted. ]

    First created in July 2016, the play is on tour after this year’s successful revival at Comédie française, and one may want to ask what relevance this story of the desintegration of a wealthy family of German industrialists’ in the era of Nazism may bear today. “Les damnés” opens with a scene of a family celebration interrupted by news of  fire at the Reichstag. We are in 1933, and the fire, allegedly started by a “Dutch communist” (as we are told a number of times), is a watershed moment set to usher in Hitler’s regime and change life as the members of Essenbeck family know it forever.

   Is van Hove, the artistic director of The Dutch Company Toneelgroep Amsterdam, who was born in Belgium and has gained international success directing theatre plays and operas all over the world, setting himself up as a provocateur (“the Dutch communist”?) and his play as an event designed to warn his audiences of what is to come? Is it a cautionary tale for a twenty-first century on the brink of a catastrophe or a mere exercise in rehashing old ideas in a (relatively) new theatrical form?

    

     In the face of a regime rapidly becoming a totalitarian one (or, simply speaking, in the face of evil), there is a number of possible avenues for resistance, and the play explores them all. There is, of course, death; there is voluntary exile, and some will choose it; there is also a kind of resistance in collaboration, for the sake of the family or for personal benefit; or, more interestingly still, there is a form of ironic collaboration, identifying with the evil in order more fully to identify with the victim, looking for extasy in violence and abuse but ultimately seeking self-annihilation and purification, a form of escape from the greed, the lust, the purposelessness of the old world order.

    After the death of their patriarch, von Essenbeck family immediately make themselves indispensable to the regime as their steel mills are put to work to produce a new kind of deadly gun (this gun, needless to say, will be fired on stage in what is presented as a cathartic moment). War appears to be able to alleviate if not cure all kinds of frustrations – career restrictions due to less than noble birth, extreme sense of loss of a loved one in a previous conflict, not to speak of sexual repressions. When a country is at war, anything goes, and violence is the only medicine.

    As Mette Ingvartsen’s “21 Pornographies” I saw last year so eloquently showed, there is a kind of expiatory beauty in the horrors of war, a space beyond morality (and yet, of course, subject to strictest judgment). The two most effective and terrifying scenes in “Les damnés” touch upon the unspeakable, and what is shown on stage only skirts around what can be thought of as the reality of the act: in the first one Martin von Essenbeck corrupts a very young girl (played, disturbingly, by a very young actress);  the second scene shows a kind of Nazi communion of Konstantin von Essenbeck (Denis Poliadès).

    Even though this latter scene is played out through an array of scenography techniques, with video projection which combines what actually happens on stage with pre-recorded material and the use of liquid props (there is water and fake blood, albeit used rather sparingly) - and, for the first time in the play, the actors strip naked  – these “tricks” work to strengthen the scene’s impact, not to create a sense of distance. At one point I was genuinely scared of what may indeed be shown to me next. 

    The same cannot be said of the play as a whole as it ends up reproducing the same devices more or less “ad absurdum” without, it seems, acknowledging the irony. In one scene the ubiquitous cameraman follows Sophie von Essenbeck (Elsa Lepoivre) who is searching for her missing son out of the auditorium and into the halls of the Barbican Centre (and even outside). Once again, the illusion of live video projection is broken here but all this scene does is elicit laughter from the audience. Similarly, the death of the first von Essenbeck is followed by a very powerful ritual; by the fifth victim of the tragic events, however, the same identical sequence can only be seen as a parody of itself, yet the rhythm of the play encourages the viewer to interpret this repetition as a build up of tension in preparation for a violent yet cathartic conclusion.

   This formal overabundance produces a split between what the play is ostensibly trying to achieve (a sense of tragedy unfolding) and the growing sense of detachment on the part of the viewer. One needs to make a certain cognitive effort in order to come back to the logic of what is going on on stage while remaining a passive and almost anaesthetised observer.

    My own curiosity for theatrical artifice is almost endless, and I found the uninterrupted two hours and ten minutes of the play riveting, yet growing disengagement from the action was intriguing. Formal repetition produces a banalisation of tragedy, yet what remains are some moments of horrific violence that never lose their impact. If cautionary tale there is, it is probably  warning us that beyond plot, beyond reason, violence remains the only expression of humanity in times of extreme crisis.