First the film, then the stage play and now an immensely impressive opera. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Festen (Celebration) is the latest incarnation of Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 movie, which is regarded as the starting point of the Dogme 95 movement in Danish cinema. With a libretto by Lee Hall based upon the English stage adaptation, Festen is the fourth opera to be derived from a Dogme-related film, following Poul Ruders’ Dancer in the Dark, Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves and Mikael Karlsson’s Melancholia (all based on screenplays by Lars von Trier).
It’s Turnage’s fourth full-length opera for adults, and the benefit of that experience shines through every bar, and is reflected in its immaculate dramatic and musical pacing. Hall has supplied him with a taut, unfussy text in which not a word is wasted, so that the awful story that unravels at the 60th birthday dinner for hotel owner Helge, of a family deeply scarred by child abuse and haunted by a suicide, is presented in a single 95-minute span that grips, moves and appals from first moment to last.
