★★★½
National Theatre Live
How odd of Ivo van Hove to turn Visconti's Ossessione (itself based on the old noir blood-curdler The Postman Always Rings Twice) into a stage show starring Jude Law and with all manner of pyrotechnics, lots of physical theatre and sweeping experiments, and a monumental use of the stage space. The upshot is impressive and imaginative, but doesn't have the intended effect of Greek tragedy. This is melodrama using a famous film by the director of The Leopard as a pretext for its pretensions and ambitions.
![Jude Law's big, beautiful eyes loom with merciless lust and Halina Reijn takes it up to him in Obsession.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170728045109im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/i/1/i/8/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxi1ag.png/1501199381381.jpg)
Susan Sontag said once that Ossessione was superior to The Leopard, but she was wrong. Visconti's adaptation of James M. Cain's trash novel pioneered Italian neorealism, but it's not Death in Venice. Ivo van Hove's Hedda Gabler with Ruth Wilson was superb, but he seems to need a great play to underpin his licence.
When Jude Law paws Halina Reijn with mannered ferocity, we feel that we are overlooking a theatrical event. Law's big, beautiful eyes loom with merciless lust and Halina Reijn takes it up to him, but this is a ritual reanimation of an old convention. Audiences thrilled at Jude Law's 2009 Hamlet and 2013 Henry V, but will want something more articulate than this brute of an everyman gone wrong.
![Halina Reijn and Jude Law star in in a stage show with pyrotechnics, lots of physical theatre and a monumental use of space.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170728045109im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/i/1/i/1/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxi1ag.png/1501199381381.jpg)
No one can deny the constant inventiveness with which van Hove activates something weird and compelling from the corpse of naturalistic drama. Engines roar, they hang from above like infernal machines, oil gushes like blood. The husband (Gus Scholten van Aschat) sings an aria from La Trav. A crypto-gay fellow drifter sings Habanera from Carmen. Rubbish is hurled around the stage like confetti, and there's a beautiful backward projection of the sea betokening oblivion as the only relief.
Oh yes, and the strains of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land clearly reference not Italy, nor any real or imaginary America, but the land of the theatre, which is always a fairyland, even when its tales are of blood and madness.
There is mastery in the way Ivo van Hove makes his stage into a space that can encompass the world, and Jude Law has just the right kind of beauty and blindness for the murderer victim. Nick Wickham's filming of the production is flawless. But ultimately, this is a bit of meta-theatre in which a talented but overreaching director broods about what the stage can do in a film-saturated world.
Obsession is showing at selected cinemas, from July 29
0 comments
New User? Sign up