Theatre in Review: The Damned (Comedie-Francaise/Park Avenue Armory)

	Didier Sandre, Christophe Montenez. Photo: Stephanie Berger

One auteur trumps another in Ivan van Hove's adaptation of Luchino Visconti's notorious 1969 film. Although best known in this country for his inventive -- and, to my eyes, frequently willful -- interpretations of classic works by O'Neill and Miller, the Belgian director is a specialist in film-to-stage transfers, including several based on the works of Visconti as well as Ingmar Bergman and John Cassavetes, among others. (He is currently working on a West End staging of About Eve.) In one sense, the time is more than right for this story of a family of German steel destroyed by an opportunistic intimacy with the Nazi Party. The von Essenbecks -- wealthy, aristocratic, and key players in an industry that is central to Germany's rearmament -- battle each other for supremacy and the approval of the National Socialist regime. All they succeed in doing is maneuvering each other into the coffins lined up at stage left. I doubt you need me to draw any modern-day parallels.

In another sense, van Hove's adaptation couldn't be riskier. Visconti's film was controversial in its day -- it won an X rating when such warnings were still applied to major studio releases -- and, viewed from the distance of half a century, it is a long, lurid exercise, a carnival of perversions that tends to obscure the political drama at its heart. The cynosure of all this carrying-on is Martin, a scion of the family, who is an incestuous transvestite and a molester of little girls -- a role played in the film by Helmut Berger, Visconti's life partner. In addition, a steamily homoerotic atmosphere prevails -- the German population appears to be drastically oversupplied with strapping male youths - and the film's centerpiece is a gay orgy among Storm Troopers, the length and detail of which cannot be justified in terms of its relevance to the plot. Even so, it pales before the final sequences -- an encounter between Martin and his mother, followed by a bizarre wedding that ends in death -- which could have been written by Herr Krafft-Ebing himself. The film fatally confuses sexual deviance with systemic political evil; at times, it seems like Bob Fosse's Cabaret minus the musical numbers, with a few extra kinks ironed in.

The stage production closely follows the screenplay by Visconti, Nicola Badalucco, and Enrico Medioli, but, by stripping out what Pauline Kael called "all this curling-lip-and-thin-eyebrow decadence," employing a minimalist and video-heavy staging approach, and pacing the story more relentlessly, van Hove remakes The Damned as a cunningly constructed endgame in which the ruthless pursuit of power inevitably ends in a pile of ashes. The action begins at a birthday party for Baron Joachim von Essenbeck, who has cannily kept the family firm a step removed from Hitler's embrace. In attendance are Wolf von Aschenbach, a cousin and German army officer who wants control of the steelworks; Konstantin, Joachim's loutish son, a member of the Storm Troopers; Friedrich Bruckmann, an executive with the firm who is Aschenbach's protégé and the lover of Sophie, Joachim's widowed daughter-in-law; Herbert Thallman, a Nazi-loathing executive married to Elisabeth, Joachim's niece; Gunther, Konstantin's son, a sensitive musician; and Martin, Sophie's son, an effeminate creature alternately smoldering with maternal devotion and seething with murderous resentment, along with a penchant for acting out. At the party, after the other members of the younger generation present Joachim with little verbal tributes or musical performances, Martin appears, shirtless under a tuxedo jacket, wearing high-heeled pumps (lovingly put on by Sophie) and face makeup, spitting the lyrics of a number that is not translated but which are clearly suffused with rage. (This is actually toned down from the film, in which Berger appears dressed like Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.)

Before the festivities are over, the news comes that the Reichstag is burning. Joachim, spurred on by this report, announces that he is making Konstantin his second-in-command. Within hours, Joachim will be dead; Herbert, framed for the murder, will flees the country; and Martin, who has inherited the firm, will install Friedrich as the head of the steelworks, infuriating Konstantin.

The savage intrigues that follow play out on the sleek orange deck designed by Jan Versweyveld, backed only by a large video screen. At stage right is a series of vanity tables where the actors change costume and watch the action; as mentioned, stage left is filled with coffins. Downstage center is a large urn and a small arrangement of steam pipes. Much of the action is tracked via live video feed: When Martin performs his song, we see Sophie's adoring face. While Friedrich and Sophie discuss their plans to gain control of the company, Konstantin's image looms over the scene. When a character dies, he or she is escorted to the coffin, the largely sculptural use of sidelight is replaced by a stark overhead strobe wash, a shrill whistle is heard, and steam blows from the downstage pipes. As this happens, another batch of ashes is emptied into the urn. In the scene that follows, the actors on stage are backed by a video image of the deceased writhing frantically in the casket. Rest assured, nobody dies quietly in The Damned.

van Hove's staging departs from the film in several respects, most of them seemingly designed to blast away its rather studied aura of corruption. We see the killing of Joachim, so the identity of the murderer is never in doubt. The Storm Trooper orgy, which culminates in the Night of the Long Knives, which in the film consumes nearly an entire reel with drunken revelry, is briefer and rendered more abstractly, with video imagery of naked soldiers seen from above, rolling about on the stage floor; it ends, however, with a brutal gesture that requires laying down a new surface on the bloodstained stage. Martin's sexual assault of Sophie, which leads to her psychotic break, is eliminated; the director has found a new and brazenly theatrical way of defiling her. The staging is so sleek as to occasionally be confusing; if you haven't seen the film, you might not recognize the scene set in the apartment belonging to Olga, a prostitute who is Martin's part-time lover, and who lives next door to a little girl who arouses Martin's erotic attentions.

Most of the time, however, The Damned is an epic portrait of moral collapse, rendered in terms that seem uncomfortably close to contemporary events. The uniformly excellent cast invests these dark and morally bankrupt doings with a reality that makes them impossible to dismiss. The highlights include Guillaume Gallienne as Friedrich, who experiences tormenting bouts of conscience as he finds himself increasingly steeped in blood; Elsa Lepoivre, whose Sophie has a kind of Valkyrie authority that improves on Ingrid Thulin's rather twitchy interpretation in the film; and Loic Corbery as Herbert, the one decent person in this feral menage, who sees the darkness coming and knows that it can't be stopped. Even with considerable reshaping, the role of Martin is still such an all-purpose deviant as to be too obvious a symbol of decline: "It's our fault, all of us," says Herbert, sadly, admitted that all the von Essenbecks blinded themselves to the horror in their midst, but the point is blurred by having Martin execute one boldly theatrical atrocity after another. Still, Christophe Montenez plays him with such ferocity that it is impossible to look away; he also enacts the play's concluding, and possibly most appalling, gesture with unnerving authority.

In addition to the design elements already mentioned, the video by Tal Yarden includes footage of busy factories and images of Dachau, where at least one character ends up. (The play is performed in French, with Yarden supplying English surtitles.) Eric Sleichim's sound design powerfully renders the production melancholy, occasionally Kurt Weill-ish underscoring, along with some intentionally assaultive effects, especially those featuring gunfire. The costumes, by An D'Huys, shuttle between period and modern styles, a strategy that further serves to connect the action to contemporary reality.

Seeing The Damned, I kept thinking of the line from Richard III, in which the title character confides to the audience, "But I am in/So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin." Everyone has a perfectly reasonable incentive for taking action: to preserve the steelworks, the family, the self. Furthermore, the characters think that they can sell a small portion of their souls in order to get ahead. The result of such accommodations is an irreversible slide into chaos. More than once, the video feed pans the audience, forcing us to look at ourselves; then again, the entire production makes us do that. -- David Barbour