Festen review – Turnage's taut new opera grips, appals and moves

The Guardian

12-02-2025

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 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.
Conducted by Edward Gardner, the orchestral score drives this tragedy inexorably, with Turnage showing an infallible sense of when to allow the quiet power of the words to speak for themselves and when to allow his music to take charge, as the action flips from black comedy to bleak horror, or has its course punctuated by authentically operatic choruses, a Danish birthday song, a savagely ironic version of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a deeply sinister conga. There are some devastating silences, alongside the briefest snatches of serene lyrical beauty, and rather more of Turnage's trademark bluesy inflections, which are only one element in a wonderfully varied musical palette.
The opera has 25 named roles, as well as a chorus and acting extras, but the way in which the main characters are sharply defined within these teeming stage pictures is remarkable. In settings by designer Miriam Buether that switch between the neutral, bland bedrooms and anonymous function room of a large hotel, Richard Jones's disciplined production handles the sometimes frenzied action adroitly, keeping things entirely naturalistic, and adding a final twist of horror in the closing scene, when after the previous evening's revelations the mood of affected normality among the departing guests mirrors the close of Britten's Peter Grimes.
It helps enormously that the cast for this ensemble piece is so uniformly superb, projecting the words with such clarity and vehemence that surtitles are all but redundant. Helge, around whom all the tragedy revolves, has relatively little to say, though he is portrayed with brooding intensity by Gerald Finley, while the children, led by Christian, passionately, heart-breakingly portrayed by Allan Clayton and followed by his sister Helena, sung with contained yet devastating intensity by Natalya Romaniw, and finally their dead sister Linda (Marta Fontanals-Simmons) destroy any pretence of this being a 'normal' family occasion. Stéphane Degout is the unpredictable, unhinged brother Michael, and Rosie Aldridge their unbelieving mother Else, while John Tomlinson and Susan Bickley contribute cameos as the Grandpa and Grandma. If Turnage's score never puts a foot wrong, neither does any aspect of its performance.
In repertory until 27 February. The opera will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 22 March and then available on BBC Sounds