Heightened Drama: Inside the operatic adaptation of Festen

“You can’t have any music,” said Thomas Vinterberg in a 2015 interview about his 1998 film Festen, created using the Dogme 95 manifesto. “I invented that rule. That was the most fearful thing for me to do, to cut away music.” That film, punctuated by unpleasant silences with no auditory accompaniment to save us, is now an opera.

Festen’s world premiere took place at London’s Royal Opera House in February 2025. Its music is composed by Mark-Anthony Turnage, a storied composer of contemporary classical, with libretto penned by Lee Hall, an acclaimed writer and lyricist who previously adapted his Billy Elliot screenplay into a musical. Directing is Richard Jones, responsible for some of the most visionary and divisive stagings of theatre and opera in recent years (including the Olivier-winning Hansel and Gretel in 2008, and the more controversial RSC’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2002). A chamber piece set across multiple rooms of a grand hotel, Vinterberg’s cult film has found itself ripe for adaptation, birthing six different stage plays internationally since 2004 – but opera is a markedly different beast from traditional theatre, elevated, maximalist, and bringing its own set of tropes and expectations.

Vinterberg’s film was the first made under the strict, self-decreed conditions of Dogme 95. A new cinematic rulebook in the tradition of Francois Truffaut’s seminal Cahiers du Cinema essay ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’, Dogme 95 and its accompanying ‘Vow of Chastity’ were drawn up by Vinterberg and co-conspirator Lars von Trier and distributed to the public in March of 1995. Part tongue-in-cheek provocation, part sincere experiment, the core aim of Dogme was to strip cinema back to its purest components, eschewing sets and non-diegetic sound in favour of a focus on narrative and immediacy to bring us closer to raw performances and emotional truth.

Festen (in English: ‘The Celebration’) chronicles the 60th birthday celebrations of Helge, esteemed patriarch and successful businessman. A swarm of guests – including Helge’s three surviving children, Christian, Helene, and Michael – gather at the family-owned hotel for an elaborate dinner. Christian, the eldest son (played in Vinterberg’s film by Ulrich Thomsen and in Jones’ production by tenor Allan Clayton) lurks unhappily at the sidelines of the festivities but takes centre stage when the toasts begin. He is the disruptive spanner in the works, revealing, in the very first speech of the night, that his father sexually abused him and his late sister Linda when they were children. The abuse drove Linda to die by suicide, one year before the story takes place.

This revelation is upsetting and discomfiting enough in words alone, but it’s heightened through form. In Vinterberg’s film, cinematographer Anthony Dodd-Mantle captures Christian’s pained face (and the comparably stoic faces of the onlookers) in claustrophobic close-up. The Dogme manifesto’s insistence on handheld cinematography renders these framings unavoidably shaky, destabilised, as we hone in on the family’s cracks, tics, and tells. The vastness of the Royal Opera House’s auditorium forces a different visual approach. “We’re on a big stage, so everything has to be bigger.” says Natalya Romaniw, who plays Helene. “If we tried to be as intimate with our actions and our responses, then it wouldn’t read in a big house”. The exaggerated gestures of the performers are similarly destabilising of the reserved decorum the dinner party demands, bringing these bitingly raw words to life with a physicality impassioned enough to capture them.

The speeches themselves are a natural match with the grammar of opera, Hall’s elegant adaptation – faithful yet economical – transforming the toasts into arias for each performer. Less expected is the transposing of the elongated silences that follow these speeches to a form that normally eschews them. Music or singing is a near-constant in opera, and dead air is unexpected and arresting, heightening the impact of the blunt revelations. “I suppose the Dogme manifesto is something akin to the Verismo movement in opera,” explains Hall. “Although it was not didactic in the way that the ‘Vow of Chastity’ was, to address sex, romance, and violence plainly was the point. Verismo resulted in all of the tropes we most associate with the heightened world of opera”.

Opera, much like Dogme, carries with it a set of fundamental traits. Whilst there are no strict rules written out in a manifesto form, most of what is uttered in opera works must be sung. Dogme is cinema stripped back to its essentials, but opera, on the other hand, is theatre that is “everything”, says Richard Jones, director of the Royal Opera House’s adaptation. It contains acting, singing, an orchestra, lavish set design, and a staggering number of on-stage creatives. Despite this maximalism, there is a similar abolition of extradiegetic elements. Performers sing without microphones, and all music is performed live, never from a recording. Whilst a far cry from the low-budget of its source material, the opera adaptation shares a certain scrappiness and immediacy – Turnage admits having written Festen’s music extremely quickly.

Opera is an art form itself renowned for disruption and reinvention: Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle, for instance, broke with traditional form and now stands as one of opera’s most celebrated works. Lars von Trier once attempted to stage it, but ultimately conceded that it exceeded his powers. By design and by circumstance, the opera rendition of Festen takes a more Brechtian approach to its staging and its relationship to its audience than its film forebear, and the results are modern and confrontational.

Both the opera and film versions of Festen takes place in a single location, but split across multiple rooms. The majority of the 100-minute work sees the dinner table take centre stage, stretching from one end to the other: Helge on one side, opposite him, Christian. It’s remarkable how similar the experience of watching the opera is to watching Vinterberg’s film, our gazes darting from performer to performer to probe their faces for reaction, propelled by voice, blocking, and the comparative stillness that surrounds the focused action. When the party splits off, three separate rooms are delineated by the presence of a bed, a bathtub, and another bed respectively, in equally-sized sections of the stage. When a new scene begins, the action does not pause in the previous one.

“It’s very filmic,” reflects Clayton. “Richard had to use a lot of clever lighting cues, and to be explicitly detailed with us as a cast”. This split approach to staging where no set divides the rooms is thematically striking, and calls to mind von Trier’s Dogville, ostensibly a piece of filmed theatre on a soundstage, with only white tape used to delineate rooms and houses. In Dogville, Grace (played by Nicole Kidman) is raped by Stellan Skarsgård’s initially kindly Chuck whilst a town meeting takes place just feet away. The assault takes place in plain view of the townsfolk on an extra-diegetic level, and Jones’ approach in Festen is similarly resonant. Helge is set upon by Michael while the dancing continues in the adjacent room; Michael and his wife have sex whilst Helene discovers Linda’s suicide note. As private scenes unfold, the bathtub in which Linda drowned herself occupies the same space, a spectre of the past that continues to impact her surviving siblings.

Festen is Brechtian in other respects, its revealed truths resonating beyond the stage itself. It is undeniable and inescapable that opera is still a strand of theatre primarily enjoyed by the privileged upper classes. To their credit, the Royal Opera House has been working to attract new audiences to Festen and other modern works through discounted tickets and youth schemes, but these changes weren’t evident on press night. Sitting in the Royal Opera House’s auditorium as someone not of that monied background makes for an winningly immersive experience. Most in attendance could plausibly be characters in Festen themselves.

Vinterberg’s film hinges on a trap being sprung – both on the guests at Helge’s dinner party, and the spectator. When we speak shortly after press night, Romaniw tells me that heckling is common at the Royal Opera House, especially when audiences are met with atypical, confrontational productions that diverge from traditional opera form and content. No such thing has yet happened with Festen – perhaps because the guests within the piece do so on the audience’s behalf.

In a daring gambit, Turnage and Hall have venomously altered the film’s ending to what Hall terms a ‘collective denial’, a new and uncompromising denouement more evocative of the less-forgiving von Trier. In Vinterberg’s film, Helge admits his wrongdoing and accepts defeat, leaving the table as his family warmly greet Christian the next morning. In the opera, these apologies are dispensed with. Helge’s guests wish Christian a polite good morning as they encounter him in the lobby, but they walk on past and out of sight until only the accusing son remains. The curtain falls where it rose, Christian alone with his pleas unheard. When the lights come up, the well-dressed and high-class in the audience stand too. They brush themselves down, and they leave, their hearty conversation shifting to other matters. The party is over, but in a new form, Festen leaves behind illuminating reflections.