Obsession

based on the film by Luchino Visconti

seen at the Barbican Theatre on 20 April 2017

Ivo van Hove directs Jude Law as Gino, Halina Reijn as Hanna, and Gijs Scholten van Aschat as Joseph, with Chukwudi Iwuji as the Priest and the INspector, Robert de Hoog as Jhnny and Aysha Kala as Anita in this adaptation of Visconti's 1942 film Ossessione, in which a drifter takes temporary work in a car repair shop and begins an obsessive affair with the proprietor's wife.

The production bears a number of Ivo van Hove's hallmarks - an all-purpose set (designed and lit by Jan Versweyveld); slow pulsing musical notes to create an expectation of doom or threat; intense emotional situations revealed in silences or sudden bursts of activity or speech; a tendency to work against the grain of the piece in order to uncover its fundamental meanings.

In this case, the piece is a film (as opposed to an existing play text). This poses some problems for van Hove's often static style, especially as a film often moves from place to place. I have not seen Ossessione and so cannot comment on how faithful the adaptation is; but the audience is required to be very attentive to changes of scene or the passage of time since there is very little concession to signalling these things. The set serves well initially as indicating both a repair shop and a place where food is available: Gino arrives and asks for a meal at a sort of bar where Hanna is indolently preparing food, while Joseph is tinkering with a huge vehicle suspended rather threateningly over the centre of the stage. However, when later the three go out, or when Gino tries to leave with or without Hanna, the presumably exterior scenes still take place on the same stage. The suspended vehicle is co-opted at the crucial point in which Joseph dies in what might have been an accident or might have been a crash contrived by on Gino. The absence of realistic visual clues is obviously deliberate - the plates of food, for example, are clearly empty, and yet Hanna at once stage is violently tenderising a slab of steak.

The effect is somewhat disconcerting, even at times confusing, though it certainly helps to establish the claustrophobic atmosphere in which Gino and Hanna become increasingly obsessed with each other. With few other characters impinging on our attention we can only witness their consuming passion and the damage that it causes. The demise of Joseph is staged with the actors becoming covered in engine oil rather than blood, which makes it in some ways more gruesome, while when Hanna and Gino clean themselves in a bath on stage afterwards there is quite a sensual charge to the process.

Though the cast is very good, the enterprise itself is not the most powerful work that I have seen from this director - the material is perhaps too intractable for this kind of treatment. It is intriguing, and the stylised staging allows the final moments to be enigmatic - does Hanna know what Gino plans to do as he finally swears his devotion and takes her away? - but perhaps the ambiguity is not actually intentional. Thought provoking, but not over-whelming.