Review: In ‘The Damned,’ Ivo van Hove Finds the Mortal Chill in a Nazi Fire

NEW YORK — Everything turns to ashes in the incinerator that blasted open at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday night. That’s where the great international theater auteur Ivo van Hove has set up an infernal, and ceaselessly creative, machine of destruction, one that burns an entire society into cinders.

This astonishing enterprise, a production of the Comédie-Française (in French, with English supertitles), goes under the name of “The Damned.” It is a stage adaptation of Luchino Visconti’s notorious 1969 film, which portrayed the death throes of a family steel dynasty during the early days of the Nazis.

Van Hove’s version, brilliantly designed by his constant collaborator Jan Versweyveld, begins with scratchy projected newsreel footage of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Berlin, which destroyed the German Parliament building and cemented the power of Adolf Hitler. It’s a vision from the past that paradoxically crackles with immediacy, with its smoke-wreathed images of a building buckling into dust.

And it is the perfect prologue for everything that follows. All those on stage, whether they know it or not, are now caught up in a conflagration that will sear them from the inside out. A few of them will survive, but not in any form we like to think of as human.

The idea of theater that scorches may not be your idea of a midsummer night’s diversion in this heat-battered July. But despite van Hove’s directorial relish for sweaty melodrama, which the cast delivers with gusto, flames burn cold in “The Damned.”

I mean cold enough to keep you shivering from beginning to end. And to know, as you leave, that what you’ve seen is inevitably going to filter into your dreams.

In recent years, with globe-wide flickers of a renaissance of fascism, Nazi has become a dangerous word, too often and too carelessly evoked for analogies to what’s happening today. Van Hove doesn’t make the mistake of pushing our faces up against the distant mirror he and his team have assembled so meticulously here.

True, certain statements give pause as the von Essenbecks, inspired by the Croesus-like Krupp family, tries to accommodate its business practices to the changing times of the Third Reich. “We just gave Germany a dirty democracy,” one character observes of the election of Hitler, adding that Nazism is “our creation, born in our factories and nourished on our money.” And “the complicity” of “our people” is later described as “the great miracle of the Third Reich.”

But the expected, obvious period iconography — deployed so lavishly in Visconti’s movie — is used sparingly here. The film’s lush, lurid palette has been exchanged for shades of black, white and silver. This is the life-blanching landscape of your most anxious nightmares, where death waits in the shadows, a feeling underscored by the pulsing thrum of Eric Sleichim’s sound design.

The large cast is introduced en masse, in modern street clothes, before the show begins. Its members stare into the audience with a perversely insinuating blankness. The suggestion is that these ordinary souls are waiting to be transformed, with the added implication that we might be, as well.

The performers proceed to sit down at makeup tables, in full view of the audience, and turn themselves into the von Essenbecks and their guests, as they dress (in An D’Huys killing costumes) for a grand family evening. It is the birthday of their patriarch, Baron Joachim (a majestically weary Didier Sandre), and their sartorial preparations and private conversations are caught on video, which is projected onto a vast screen at center stage.

This turns out to be an inspired means for introducing us to an immense and complicated assortment of characters — and their genealogy and back stories and how each stands in relation to the new populist movement overtaking the country. Their shifting positions in a slippery hierarchy of power are conveyed throughout by how they are framed — and enlarged and shrunken — through the perspective of the roving camera, part of Tal Yarden’s dazzlingly effective video design. The political attitudes of the characters, embodied with unnerving intensity and discipline by the cast, cover a range of viewpoints: Joachim’s aristocratic disdain; the eagerness to cooperate of his brutish son Konstantin (Denis Podalydès); the moral horror of the firm’s vice-president, Herbert Thallman (Loïc Corbery) and his genteel wife, Elisabeth (Adeline d’Hermy).

In the long run, though, it isn’t ideology that counts most but rabid self-interest — and a hunger for revenge. The self-serving aspect is beautifully embodied by Joachim’s widowed daughter-in-law, Sophie (a great, glacial Elsa Lepoivre) and her opportunistic lover, Friedrich Bruckmann (Guillaume Gallienne).

Always hovering nearby are Sophie’s glamorous, demented (and incestuous, child-molesting) son, Martin (Christophe Montenez, fabulous) and the reptilian Wolf von Aschenbach (Eric Génovèse), a Sturmabteilung officer who may lose his temper but never his control. The febrile Martin and the icy Wolf might seem to be polar opposites. What this production (based on the screenplay by Visconti, Nicola Badalucco and Enrico Medioli) brings out so acutely is how these antithetical creatures were made for each other, at least for purposes of mutual exploitation in ungodly times. Politics and bedfellows and all that, although the bed in which slimy little Martin winds up isn’t that of Wolf but his own mother.

If you didn’t see the movie, you may miss that last unsavory plot point. Nor does Montenez, in a role immortally originated by Helmut Berger, put on Marlene Dietrich drag, though he does don high heels and a lot of mascara. Van Hove — a master of distillation in works that include the Tony-winning 2015 Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” — traffics in more elegant but equally disturbing images.

And where Visconti’s film always teeters on the brink of spectacular camp, van Hove’s production pulls back for a more clinical view. He and Versweyveld make devastating use of visual metaphors for unspeakable atrocities. And their extraordinary rendering, with Yarden, of the 1934 mass slaughter within the Nazi Party known as the Night of the Long Knives has to be witnessed firsthand.

The show’s dominant conceit, though, is that of an ongoing requiem, for a people unwittingly taking part in a long funeral procession to their own graves. And without giving away the show’s most harrowing imagery — a superlative for which there’s plenty of competition — I should warn you that these are not quiet graves.

The choices these characters make live on and on, viscerally as well as abstractly. This rich and merciless production makes it clear that they are indeed damned for all eternity.

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Production Notes:

‘The Damned’

Through July 28 at Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; 212-616-3930, armoryonpark.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

Based on Luchino Visconti, Nicola Badalucco and Enrico Medioli’s work; directed by Ivo van Hove; sets and lights by Jan Versweyveld; costumes by An D’Huys; video by Tal Yarden; sound by Eric Sleichim; dramaturgy by Bart Van den Eynde. Presented by the Comédie-Française in collaboration with Park Avenue Armory.

Cast: Sylvia Bergé, Eric Génovèse, Denis Podalydès, Alexandre Pavloff, Guillaume Gallienne, Elsa Lepoivre, Loïc Corbery, Adeline d’Hermy, Clément Hervieu-Léger, Jennifer Decker, Didier Sandre, Christophe Montenez, Sébastien Baulain, Basile Alaïmalaïs, Tristan Cottin, Thomas Gendronneau, Pierre Ostoya Magnin, Axel Mandron, Tom Wozniczka, Madison Cluzel, Gioia Benenati and Lucy-Lou Marino.