The twilight zone

When theatre director Christiane Jatahy first saw Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville, starring Nicole Kidman as a Great Depression-era runaway named Grace, she was shocked. ‘It made a great impact on me,’ she recalls. ‘The way that Lars von Trier worked, in between theatre and cinema, and how he was going to a place that was so strong and violent was very arrresting. But at the same time, it was very difficult for me. From the beginning, I had a conflict with this film.’

Indeed, even by the standards of Danish provocateur von Trier, Dogville is one of his more extreme projects. All set on a darkened soundstage, with just white markings on the floor etching out where buildings stand, Kidman’s Grace Mulligan is on the run from mobsters when she winds up in a Rocky Mountains town in Colorado. She’s given refuge, in return for helping the townsfolk with chores. But as the mood darkens, the atmosphere changes and Grace is ultimately enslaved and repeatedly raped by inhabitants.

Inspired by Dogville, Jatahy decided to create a theatrical piece entitled Entre Chien Et Loup (or Dusk, in English). ‘Not to do an adaptation, because it’s not an adaptation of Dogville,’ she explains. ‘It’s a dialogue with this film. It’s a kind of debate with this film.’ Playing at this year’s International Festival (the first time this Brazilian-born theatre director’s efforts have been produced in Britain), Dusk marks the inaugural piece in a trio of works that Jatahy created. Together with the second and third parts (Before The Sky Falls and After The Silence), she calls it, ominously, ‘the horror trilogy’.

‘I was really obsessed about the idea to do more than one piece about the same thing that touched me,’ she says. In this case, Jatahy was watching on, disturbed, with Jair Bolsonaro as Brazilian president between 2019 and 2022. ‘It was important for me to think fascism can grow in invisible ways,’ she says. While her focus was always going to be her native Brazil, caught in the midst of a crisis thanks to Bolsonaro’s authoritarian rule, she is swift to point out that extreme right-wing politics can (and have) surfaced across the world, almost imperceptibly.

So how does all this fit into Dusk, you might wonder? In the piece, a young Brazilian woman named Graça flees the quasifascist regime of her homeland. She encounters a community of theatrical players staging Dogville. ‘They ask themselves, and ourselves, how it’s possible to accept others? To be together, to accept difference,’ says Jatahy.

At first Graça is welcomed into the group, but she’s gradually exploited and abused. So is she a carbon copy of Kidman’s character? No, says Jatahy. ‘She’s not passive. She’s a woman today who really believes it’s possible to change. Not in the same way that Grace in the film accepts everything. She really fights.’

In Jatahy’s eyes, her production is an intersection of past and present. ‘This is what interested me. How it’s possible, when you know what happens when fascism arrives, to live through this again. How you can allow this. Dogville is the past. But how is it possible to repeat this again? In Brazil, we had 20 years of dictatorship, yet people vote for someone who defended dictatorship? This question is not about us only, but something that’s happening all over the world.’

Jatahy, whose celebrated career includes her winning the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre at the 2022 Venice Biennale, has previously been praised for her abilities to merge theatre and cinema (that same year, she created The Lingering Now, a multimedia take on Homer’s Odyssey). Dusk would seem to be no different, especially with its mix of live filming and recorded segments. Of course, as she rightly points out, she didn’t follow Lars von Trier’s use of minimalist sets, which were inspired by Bertolt Brecht (particularly The Threepenny Opera).

The presence of this 1900s dramatist, however, still hovers over the show, with Jatahy’s characters breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience. After Dusk premiered at the Avignon Festival in 2021 (where The Guardian called it ‘a piece of high artistic maturity’), it’s been touring around ever since. To date, though, von Trier has yet to see it, although Jatahy is full of praise for him.

‘He gave me the freedom to work with this film,’ she says. He was very generous. I hope that one day I can show it to him.’ He should certainly be pleased; according to Jatahy, those who see Dusk but have not seen Dogville are now seeking out the film.

‘This is a kind of circle,’ she says. ‘And then people come back to see the theatre show again, with the memory of this film. So, really, it’s a beautiful dialogue.’

Dusk, Lyceum Theatre, 5–8 August, 7.30pm; 7 August, 2.30pm.