REVIEW – FESTEN [A Celebration]
based on the Dogme film and play by Thomas Vinterberg
translated by David Eldridge
and adapted and directed by Dave Pearce

A Performance by 2nd Year Acting Students,
University of Central Lancashire
St Peter’s Arts Centre, Preston
Thursday 14 to Saturday 16 April 2005

A dinner-time celebration of
sex, squalor and sadness at sixty
or, a vivid portrayal of a seriously dysfunctional family

Researching Lancaster’s theatrical ‘competition’
Having reviewed much theatre performed by students at Lancaster University and, more recently, St Martin’s College, your critic was intrigued recently by an invitation to see what they can do on stage at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston. When details of the particular performance came through, I could not stifle my curiosity any further.

And I was not disappointed – far from it.

Radical Danish drama
According to my helpful briefing, Festen was a recent play based on an innovative Danish approach to cinema in direct antithesis to Hollywood values, techniques - and content, too. The play, adapted and directed by Course Tutor Dave Pearce, deals with the sixtieth birthday celebrations (as in the title) of Helge Hansen, a well-heeled and successful businessman and father-of-four.

Like our own Ian Hastings, Pearce has a very sharp eye for detail - visual, verbal and otherwise. The theatre’s foyer was bedecked with fairy lights and a ‘Happy 60th Birthday’ festoon, and even the box office, cloakroom, bar staff and front-of-house were formally dressed in black and white to serve the assembled guests. So the audience, duly welcomed, is clearly all set and ready for a feast of a time.

A serially dysfunctional family
But as the play starts - with a torrent of abuse and invective as the guests and family arrive and go for each others’ throats - things soon start to go downhill. We quickly learn from Helge’s two sons, Christian and Michael, that Christian’s twin sister Linda has recently been buried after her mysterious suicide… and, later, that Hegle himself is not quite the loving, caring man of integrity one might expect in a father.

Oh dear no, not at all. The family cupboard conceals skeletons of Helge’s sexual abuse of his eldest twin daughter and son (and implicitly Kim the chef too), with his wife’s apparent connivance.

As for the rest of the family, there is just not the space to list all the various scrapes, mental institutions, failed marriages, hypochondria and more that Helge’s family, children, their partners and friends have got into.

Top all this with senile grandparents, add Helge’s remaining daughter Helene’s choice of partner (Sulola, a black lesbian) who is the victim of the manic prejudice of Helge’s unstable second son Michael, and you get the general idea. It makes East Enders look like Blue Peter, though we are spared the narcotics.

A physically powerful performance
This, you may think, does not add up to a great evening’s entertainment. Wrong – it did. The sharp and vibrant dialogue of the translation, ingeniously and lavishly adapted for stage by Dave Pearce, gave the cast of eighteen a chance to show their mettle. And they revelled in it, every one of them.

The action was physically delivered with great passion, noise, vigour and total commitment from everyone on stage. Particularly from the manic and odious brothers Christian (Oliver Peace) and Michael (Paul Day) and their outrageous (surviving) sister Helene (Katey Siddall).

David Tynan played 'birthday boy' Helge with a presence and dignity unusual for one in his twenties, and Jacqui Williams’ silent portrayal of the young child Lara was a masterpiece of body language and sustained characterisation. Of the servants, Mat McGuirk’s unctuous Lars was one of the most laconic and deliciously sniffy performances I have seen in a while, and he was quite Wildean in gravitas.

A visual feast
Staging, too, was excellent. Using the abundance of space in St Peter’s Arts Centre (in fact a converted 1825 church) we were now in Helge’s reception area, now six-in-a-bed, now painfully in the late daughter’s room and, most visually stunning of all, at the celebratory birthday dinner for twelve. Here the tables were sumptuously laid out with linen, napery, polished glassware and china, and the lobster (?) soup was duly served, followed by the main course.

The whole meal was presented, waited on and cleared with impeccable, full professional silver service and admirable decorum.

Against this striking backdrop, the verbal pyrotechnics really took off over the meal. With a visual reminder of another betrayal (at The Last Supper, in Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic 1497 view), the dirt and foul secrets violently tumbled out as the alcohol went in, and the only ones left with any dignity at the end were the chef (perhaps – but see above), Lars and the rest of the domestic staff.

Morning-after nemesis
But there was still more to come. After Christian’s eerie encounter with his late sister Linda – magically staged – there was the inevitable morning after. Over breakfast the hapless Helge was banished as the family munched away as the family – and indeed the audience – wondered just who had learned what from the traumas of the previous evening.

I am still wondering, even after reading the text and watching the DVD. What I am certain of, though, is that this was an immensely powerful and moving evening, with theatre skills of a high order – on stage from the cast, from the rest of the crew, from the incredibly fecund imagination and detailed skill of their director.

A challenge from Preston
This was theatre of a standard that equals the best of our own Lancaster University Theatre Group and St Martin’s College. It was certainly worth travelling for, and I am seriously looking forward to my next invitation to Preston.

Copyright © 22 April 2005 Michael Nunn

Check out Festen on the official Dogme website here