The room fell silent, save for a scattershot of camera shutters. Sat at a table flanked by his actors, celebrated Danish director Lars von Trier seemed hell-bent on plunging his career into a kamikaze nosedive. A rictus-grinned Kirsten Dunst, shifting awkwardly in her chair, placed a hand on von Trier's shoulder, perhaps in an attempt to bring him back to reality; next to her, a quietly desperate Stellan Skarsgard looked on in wide-eyed astonishment. In front of them, the world's press assembled at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival could do little more than bear witness to this inexplicable scene. Von Trier, with a strangely mundane tone to his softly spoken voice, had just claimed to be a Nazi, adding, "What can I say - I understand Hitler."
This extraordinary press conference in 2011 was intended to promote von Trier's latest film, Melancholia, a work that had been tipped for greatness at Cannes and other major international cinema events. Instead, it had turned out to be a baffling display of career suicide, in what many commentators predicted would be the end of von Trier's rise as one of the world's great auteurs.
In fact, besides from a fleeting ban from Cannes, von Trier's career wasn't critically derailed. And moreover, his Nazi sympathies (which he later dismissed as a joke) might even reveal the director's essential perspective - one that has often been the fulcrum from which he has hung his storytelling: the belief that destruction is an inevitability. And what's more, a beautiful one.
Found in the heartbreaking injustice of Dancer In The Dark, the psychosexual horror of Antichrist, and more recently, the erotic corrosion of Nymphomaniac, von Trier has always been drawn to the idea of obliteration, both self-inflicted and unavoidable. At the core of his art lies an urge to provoke inner tortures, both his own and his audience's. But in metaphorical and surprisingly lyrical ways, he gives them form through a sublime brand of bittersweet romanticism. Is it all that surprising that an artist whose work is defined by acts of wanton annihilation would dare to stage a similar moment at his own press conference?
"I remember when I first saw the film back in 2011. Afterwards I thought, 'I really feel like this is a play. This is a piece for the stage.'"
Director Matthew Lutton also has an affinity for stories of destruction (although not, I hasten to add, tone-deaf Nazi comedy). Many of his major outings during his tenure as Malthouse Artistic Director have imagined insurmountable forces - of the supernatural in Picnic At Hanging Rock; the physical in The Real And Imagined History Of The Elephant Man; and the innate in Edward II - pitting his characters against challenges they cannot hope to overcome. In this regard, Melancholia is an ideal narrative for Lutton. It explores the strained, emotionally wrought relationship between two sisters, Claire and Justine, the latter suffering from profound depression. As their family unravels, the painted rust of privilege and the meaninglessness of social status are revealed two-fold, by the bleak internal struggle that threatens to destroy Justine, and by the colossal rogue planet on a collision course with Earth that threatens to destroy everything else.
By contrast, playwright Declan Greene, the adaptor of this reimagined stage iteration of Melancholia, is best known as a writer of satirically-edged queer theatre. Exploring a more earnest theatrical voice could be seen as something of a departure — "This play is honest to god naturalism. I've never done that before," he admits when we sit down to discuss the play during a break in rehearsals.
But while he may share a less conspicuous link to the tonality of von Trier's work, he nonetheless feels a close artistic connection to Melancholia's narrative. "I remember when I first saw the film back in 2011. Afterwards I thought, 'I really feel like this is a play. This is a piece for the stage,'" Greene explains. "If you step back and look at the bare bones of the story, it's a bunch of aristocrats in a far-flung country house, and this family unit starts to crumble and dissolve under the weight of this kind of dramaturgy of depression and a life unfulfilled. It's set in one really pressurised location. There's a lot of intimacy. And that's always stuck in my mind, every time I've rewatched the film: this is a story about those intense relationships, not a planetary disaster."
There are, however, significant hurdles for anyone transplanting von Trier's film to the stage, beyond the obvious technical headscratcher of how to depict a collision between two heavenly bodies. It's a film that resists a conventional transcription: much of Melancholia's dialogue is improvised and the operatic scope of its dramatic inertia is driven by von Trier's trademark cinematography, with its artful use of framing and jump cuts. Overcoming these challenges has altered the nature of Greene and Lutton's task. This reimagined Melancholia has become more of an homage than a traditional adaptation, taking the core themes and characters of the film, but gifting them newly created dialogue.
It's an approach that von Trier himself has approved. "One of the briefs we had was that we should adhere to the spirit of the original - that was the main piece of direction we got from Lars," Greene shares. "Obviously, I absolutely love the film, and I do feel a reverence towards it as a film buff and a lover of von Trier's work. But I also feel like the act of adapting, it can't be reverent. You have to be able to take that source material, and reconfigure it so it succeeds as brilliantly as possible in its new format."
Released from the pressures of creating a shot-for-shot live action remake, Greene has been able to explore the characters of Justine and Claire with more freedom and intent. "I feel like what I've written is actually a chamber drama. I'm not fucking with the philosophical or the metaphysical ideas, or that beautiful set of complex questions the film poses. I'm far more interested in figuring out the best way to create a stage language that articulates and accommodates and teases out those ideas," he shares.
"It's been a process of distilling the essence of the thing down to something that is stageable. For example, one aspect the film achieves so successfully is how it represents the experience of depression. It's so evocative in its sense of trauma and its sense of deeply sinking into nothingness and stasis. Von Trier does it by lingering on Kirsten Dunst when she's in that state of mind, by creating these sublime moments of calm. Clearly, you can't literally do that on stage. So it's been a process of figuring out how to capture that complexity and nuance, and how to communicate the individual viewpoints of the characters and the way they see the world."
Malthouse Theatre presents Melancholia from 13 Jul
