Ivo van Hove’s production of The Damned, at the Avignon festival, is a masterstroke. Adapted from the screenplay of Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film, it is a dangerous, vast and virtuoso production that confronts its time and context with chilling force, showing, in the director’s own words, “a celebration of evil”.
Van Hove was granted the festival’s opening slot in the challenging Cour d’Honneur following Avignon successes with The Fountainhead (2014) and Shakespeare’s Roman Tragedies (2008). The venue has sunk mighty talents with its 40-metre-wide stage, 2,000-seat bleacher and a 14th-century stage wall that seems more geological than architectural. Added to this, Van Hove was entrusted with the venerable Comédie-Française company la Troupe, who have been absent from Avignon for 23 years.
Van Hove was uncannily prescient when he chose this work 18 months ago. This is a desperately dark drama – depicting the sudden corruption and destruction of a notable steel dynasty by nascent Nazism – which resonates now with Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign, ideologically driven terror and the recent xenophobic unravelling of the incumbent British political establishment.
It is also a very European production (Van Hove is Belgian) in the context of a festival that was founded in 1947 as a bulwark against the horror of the second world war.
Avignon this year shows a continental Europe working well together, and reaching out to the Middle East. This production in particular reruns in situ the machinations that would lead a decade later to the positive European project. There is a circular character to the proceedings, a feeling that we could easily slip back to chaos. The crowd of French political heavyweights in attendance were doubtless here not just to be entertained, but also to live a lesson.
The production excels theatrically, technically, spatially and musically. Van Hove’s life and creative partner, Jan Versweyveld, has conjured up a bare bones setting consisting of a central orange floor backed by a vast LED screen that gives us intimate details of the characters’ faces. This is bracketed stage right by a changing and makeup area with beds (which feature in the incestuous action) and bleachers from which the performers watch while not active. Stage left there is a musical ensemble – playing live “degenerate” Schoenberg and Berg (combined with recorded, crushingly loud Rammstein) – and six open coffins awaiting their occupants. A real, ear-splitting steamwhistle signals deaths, which are also marked by blinding house lights and a ritual procession to the coffin. As with Greek tragedy, the dark deeds themselves are not shown (with the exception of the gay snuff-orgy Night of the Long Knives, shown as a bloodbath mixing live and filmed action). The dead then writhe in horror in their coffins on the video screen, as if aware that their sacrifice will serve no purpose.
The synergy between Van Hove and la Troupe is evidently exceptional. The actors work together and individually to perfection, and are able to fill the vast space and focus on tiny details without it ever seeming forced. Among this wonderful ensemble, Christophe Montenez’s psychopathic, paedophile, gender-fluid Nazi turncoat, Martin von Essenbeck, shines in some remarkable setpieces, including a final tableau in which – naked and covered in his victims’ ashes – he turns his arms-dealing family’s machine gun on the audience. People in my row jumped; the Bataclan is a painful recent memory. During the subsequent audience ovation, a man a few seats from me booed and snarled at his neighbours. He should have been on stage.
•At Cour d’Honneur du Palais des Papes, Avignon, until 16 July. Box office: +33 (0)490 141414. Festival d’Avignon runs until 24 July.
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