Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog

This is the fourth Visconti film director Ivo van Hove has adapted for the stage, but the first we’ve seen in the UK. It was his first film, considered to be the beginning of neo-realism, based on the short American novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (though why on earth it was called that is beyond me), as was a French film adaptation three years before Visconti’s. This was the title of the English language film adaptations 6 years and 39 years later. There was an opera in 1982 and Hungarian and German-Turkish film adaptations more recently. I can’t help but ask the question Why? Visconti crossed over to theatre and opera and it’s one of those coincidences I’m so fond of that his first stage adaptation, Les Infantes Terribles, was also the play (in a much later adaptation at the National) in which I first saw the star of this, Jude Law.

It’s a tale of self-destructive passion. Gino is a drifter who wanders into the restaurant / bar of Joseph and his much younger wife Hannah and instantly falls for her. After initial hostility from Joseph, he repairs his car and water pump in exchange for his food and then moves on. He meets another drifter, Johnny, an odd scene which is a touch homoerotic, and the even younger Anita, but Joseph finds him and brings him back with an offer of lodging in exchange for jobs; I found this rather implausible – why would you put such tempation in front of your young wife? The relationship between Gino and Hannah gets ever more passionate and obsessive before they kill Joseph and begin the journey on the road to self-destruction.

This is my seventh van Hove production and I’m beginning to think he may be a master of recycling rather than reinvention. There are a lot of trick’s he’s played before, including sparseness in staging, video projections and a brooding soundtrack. It’s now clear he has a ‘house style’; it would be nice to see more diverse approaches. The pace was rather slow, though it did come alive in the steamy scenes, where projections are used to great effect, during struggles and when violent acts are committed. Different parts of the stage are used for different locations and you occasionally have to quickly work out where you are at that moment. The Barbican stage is vast and it does make you feel detached from it. I felt more like a voyeur, somewhat uninvolved in it.

It’s also the seventh time I’ve seen Jude Law on stage and he continues to impress, and there was great chemistry with his excellent co-star Halina Reijn. She and the other two Dutch actors shame us all with their fluent virtually accent-free English.

I’m glad I went, but it didn’t really live up to my expectations – good rather than great.