A row of actors introduce themselves amenably and announce their upcoming play: they are going to adapt Lars von Trier’s 2003 film, Dogville, with its story of a fugitive woman given harbour by a small community in the Rocky Mountains in lieu of her labour, while one member of this troupe films the action. They enlist an additional actor, rising from within the audience, to play Graça, here escaping a quasi-fascist regime in Brazil.
Adapted and directed by the Brazilian film and theatre-maker Christiane Jatahy, this production might be seen as part of a growing – at times frustratingly derivative – trend to bring well-loved films to the stage. What is refreshing here is that even though the film forms the basis for this intriguing show, it is not a straightforward adaptation by any means. Rather, it takes Von Trier’s framework of theatrical artifice, and his themes, to use them with utmost self-awareness.
The relationship between film and theatre in the original is not in itself a straightforward one: Von Trier borrows from Brechtian black box theatre, with all the action on a soundstage. Here that dynamic shifts so that the drama on stage is edited and reproduced on a back-screen on to which live filmed footage is projected (along with English surtitles). Slowly we realise that there are pre-recorded edits sneaked into the film too and this prompts questions around truth, reality and representation, visually symbolised by Thomas Walgrave’s mirrored set design.
Jatahy has said Von Trier’s film gathered new meaning for her after the election of Jair Bolsonaro’s government in Brazil in 2018. The production reflects on the exploitation of an outsider by a community sliding into tyranny and abuse, enacted on Graça both as unpaid labour and sexual violation.
The townspeople, variously played by Véronique Alain, Paulo Camacho, Azelyne Cartigny, Philippe Duclos, Vincent Fontannaz, Delphine Hecquet, Viviane Pavillon, Matthieu Sampeur and Valerio Scamuffa, shift the furniture around, as if at a rehearsal, and remain actors as well as characters interacting with and gradually exerting control over Graça.
It is an ambitious framework, a little flat and rambling for too long as the actors collect themselves in preparation for their play. But its complications pay off in some scenes of great suspense and hypnotic power, amplified by live piano (musical composition by Vitor Araújo) and Jean Keraudren’s slowly creepy sound design.
At other times the production’s cleverness becomes confusing, with multiple visual and aural elements in play at once. Key scenes from the film are enacted, such as the breaking of Graça’s figurines, a child’s blackmailing demand to be smacked, the assaults and rapes. As powerful as these are, they are rather oblique and audiences who have not seen Dogville might be left puzzled by the lack of narrative context.
Graça is not the mobster’s daughter of the film but a woman seeking asylum and there is more credence to her story here. Where Von Trier’s ending wreaked Old Testament violence, here there is a lecture as a conclusion, rather too pedagogic.
The power of the production still wins out, and its ideas – on how we think we would welcome a stranger into our midst, and how we might betray ourselves by inches – stay potent in the mind.
