Festen's dark secrets

I was mesmerised by Festen, a compelling thriller of the serious sort. It faces up to incest, suggests what long-term damage the victims suffer and is inexorably possessed by dread.

In the opening scene Jonny Lee Miller's brooding, 30-year-old Christian stands at the door of his family's country house. In his mind he hears the echo of children's voices and running water that will continually haunt his homecoming.

The atmosphere simmers with tension as other offspring arrive home for their father Helge's 60th birthday. Christian's brother Michael, with wife and child in tow, is fired by aggression in Tom Hardy's remarkable, quicksilver performance.

Their mother Else, whom excellent Jane Asher plays with the glacial glamour of royalty visiting downandouts, provides a frigid welcome. David Eldridge has ingeniously adapted Thomas Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov's Danish film about sexual abuse in the bosom of the family. Rufus Norris's magnificent, stylised production advances beyond realism and lends the inexorable strangeness of a bad dream.

Flashes of black humour come as welcome relief, particularly from wonderful Sam Beazley's Grandfather, a comic delight, benignly basking in repetitive senility and confusion. Festen is set in the present but keeps looking back to the past. This prosperous, racist family, together with a doting business partner, has gathered for Helge's birthday, but festivities are ominously clouded by the recent suicide of Christian's twin, Linda.

In its original form Festen launched the minimalist Dogme 95 Movement. Now Ian MacNeil's wonderful sets allow an equivalent freedom. Jean Kalman's lighting and Orlando Gough's music heighten the ominous mood. The stage is a bare, black space on which objects keep rising dramatically into view. Rear panels rise and fall like garage doors.

A huge bed, on which Christian, a maid with whom he is on more than servile terms, Michael and his wife all disport themselves, rears up from below floor level. At the long dining table Christian stands to salute his father and recalls what regularly happened at Daddy's bath-time to himself and Linda: "And he lay us down on the green sofa and he raped us," he says without undue feeling.

The effect is quite sensational. Faithful to the protocol for dealing with sexual cover-ups or unsubstantiated sexual charges, no one utters a word of protest, though the expression of every face speaks shocked volumes.

From this point Festen begins its fascinating drift away from the real word. The party breaks up, comes together again, surrenders to rituals of child-like song and dance. The crucial game of keeping up appearances and putting down Christian as an alienated fantasist and mental patient begins.

Else, corseted in steely, snobbish decorum, and Robert Pugh's smug, sinister Helge launch the resistance to Christian's truth-telling. At a memorable blast of revelation Asher's face registers high-degree shock.