Richard III (Hans Kesting) stands on a stage that has been stripped back of nearly everything, manipulating Lady Anne (Hélène Devos) into marriage.
He oversaw the death of her father-in-law; she is distraught. He holds the power of life and death in his hand; she holds none.
Although they speak Dutch in front of a largely English-speaking audience, their performances are so captivating, the minutiae of their body movements so delicate and nuanced, you can turn your head away from the surtitles and still understand what’s happening.
This is towards the end of Ivo van Hove’s Kings of War, the centerpiece of the theatre program of this year’s Adelaide festival. The scale of Van Hove’s work here is huge: a four-and-a-half-hour performance of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III, a cast of 19 actors and musicians – and one videographer – playing to a theatre of 2,000 seats.
The work weaves the onstage world with the backstage, streams of conversations transferred to twisting white hallways where a corner is turned and suddenly the space is filled with dead bodies or a rave.
But in spite of this largesse, what makes Van Hove’s treatment of these plays fascinating is the way he has distilled them into, essentially, office dramas. We are used to seeing contemporary productions of Shakespeare’s tragedies presented as bombastic sound and fury. Here, conversations are quieter: kings are disposed of and royal marriages are manipulated because of thought games and a greed for power that is all together more insidious than many productions would lead us to believe.
In this, it is in the scenes where the work is at its quietest – a leering, posturing Richard III softly talking to a bereft Anne – that Kings of War is at its strongest. The ensemble formation of actors at Toneelgroep Amsterdam has no contemporary equivalent in Australian theatre and the depth of the cast’s performances and the nuances of their relationships with each other are stunning.
Van Hove was last in Adelaide with Roman Tragedies, itself a six-hour Shakespearean adaptation – and the most talked about production at the festival since The Mahabharata in 1988. Comparisons are inevitable but it is perhaps not fair that an artist like Van Hove become judged on such a sliver of his work. In some ways, it feels like the Adelaide festival – or at least its marketing strategy – has been trying to play catch-up ever since, first with The James Plays and now with Kings of War. These plays – long, epic in scale, either based on plays or history from 16th century – have taken up a particular place in the Adelaide festival consciousness.
Four years ago, just before the last South Australian election, there was a ferocious contemporaneousness to Roman Tragedies: footage from news reports from the campaign ran on the stage; the work ended on the streets of Adelaide with footage broadcast back into the theatre. In light of this, Kings of War feels all at once more removed – and certainly not engaged with the strangeness of this year’s election.
But it is technically a stunning achievement. Van Hove plays with large images on his expansive sweep of a stage, not least of all in the video work that walks us through backstage worlds impossible to be formed in the theatre but woven in so carefully you almost – almost – feel the backstage area of the Festival theatre is truly filled with sheep. The brass band of act one gives a intriguing out-of-world regality to this contemporised world; the electronic score of act two beats under the growing discomfort of an evil Richard III.
Four-and-a-half hours is long for a single production but it is short for a trilogy of Shakespeare, and Van Hove rips through them, breaking them down into the most important beats in a story not of one man but of decades of men, civil war and unjust power. The translation from English to Dutch and then back to English through surtitles throws up Shakespeare’s text in surprising ways: not beholden to fidelity, we can see these scenes truly new.
Indeed, on the page, all of the elements are there: an intriguing trilogy, inventive staging, powerhouse performances. But, at the end of the night, something fails to bind.
Perhaps it is Roman Tragedies looming too large; perhaps it is that the lure of framing these stories by their smallness makes them not big enough to fill four-and-a-half hours. Tease apart the elements, you have something outstanding: step back and see the whole and, somehow, they all add up to less than their parts.
• Kings of War is at the Adelaide festival until 13 March
