In this adaptation of a Danish thriller, almost all the characters conform to movie-trope behavior and movie-trope actions.
Es Devlin loves a glass box. “Stage designer” isn’t quite a full description of what she does: At this point, Devlin is one of the highest-powered theater-adjacent artists in the world. Everyone wants her glass boxes — Kanye and Jay-Z, Sam Mendes, the Met, Lorde, pretty much anyone who has a halftime show or closing ceremony to stage or a Royal Opera House lying around. What gives these vitrines their impact (and their vast influence; I sometimes feel as though European scenic design overall is in its Devlin Period) is their expression of the layered and nonliteral. “Es doesn’t design plays,” the director Lyndsey Turner told The New Yorker in 2016. “Or, at least, she doesn’t design the locations in which they’re set. Instead, she designs the ideas, the thought structures, the systems in which the characters operate.” Or, as Devlin herself put it, “What I’m really designing are mental structures, as opposed to physical ones.” Devlin’s glass boxes can convey vulnerability, a feeling of being trapped or of a world that might easily shatter, or they can speak of privacy and its violations, of transparency and deception, or of people who shouldn’t throw stones.
Right now, one of them is smack-dab center stage at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Rupert Goold’s production of The Hunt. This one is modestly sized and literally house-shaped — the kind of house a child might draw, a box with a triangular roof. It can spin on a revolve, and its walls can go clear or opaque depending on the light. People and things appear inside it as if by magic (in reality, through a trapdoor). Here — in David Farr’s adaptation of the 2012 Danish film Jagten directed by Thomas Vinterberg — the Devlin box feels like an image of community, of how delicate it can be, and how invasive and claustrophobic. There are moments when all 13 of the show’s actors crowd inside, and we can feel the suffocating intimacy of the characters’ intertwined small-town lives. In other moments, its surfaces cloud over, and when a knock or a noise comes from within, paranoia crackles: What lurks outside, or inside, the home? How well do any of us know our neighbors? How safe and solid are any of our walls?
Would that Farr and Goold’s work gave us as much to consider as Devlin’s, but beyond the rich evocations of its set, The Hunt is a frustrating affair. It aims for thrillerish tension, but in its attempt to sound the direful minor chords of parable, Farr’s script forces its characters into behavior that feels at best underexamined and at worst absurd. Will they make the worst possible decisions, the most drastic leaps to conclusion, the most violent threats, and the least reasonable assumptions in every situation? You bet they will. Will our beleaguered protagonist fail to defend himself almost every time he gets the opportunity? The man can barely get a sentence out. Will the play indulge in some classically manipulative moves from the Tropes for High-Tension Dramas About Communal Persecution of an Innocent Man playbook? Well, there is a real dog onstage, and yes, it belongs to our hero, and no, you shouldn’t get attached to it.
Our hero is Lucas Bruun — handsome, soft-spoken, recently divorced, and the only male teacher at Sunbeam Infants School, a day care in a rural hunting community somewhere in Northern Denmark. (Farr’s script retains the movie’s Danish setting and names, though it might have helped to reset the story entirely, leaning into a cultural milieu that actors from the U.K. could make feel less allegorical and more grittily specific.) The role was played in Vinterberg’s film by Mads Mikkelsen, and if the producers’ goal was to achieve the same degree of superhuman cheekbone strength onstage, then they’ve succeeded. Here, the jawline belongs to Tobias Menzies (The Crown, Outlander, Game of Thrones, and many other projects with considerable costume budgets). Menzies is a wonderful actor — he can be frightening or insidious or deeply sympathetic; his Emmy-winning Prince Philip was in many ways the surprisingly complex heart at the center of The Crown’s last really good seasons. But there’s something about him that cuts against the grain of Lucas, whose somewhat lonely but basically okay life is put on the fast-track to hell when one of his students, a quiet little girl named Clara (the serious, elfin Aerina DeBoer when I saw the show), accuses him of touching her.
The accusation is a lie, born of a collision of shame, confusion, and new-information overload in Clara’s mind. Her classmate Peter (I saw Christopher Riley) has just shown her a pornographic video on his father’s old cell phone, and Lucas has just gently rebuffed an uncomfortably romantic advance from her. She doesn’t know better — she’s 7, her parents fight constantly, and she’s just looking for love and care, trying out things she’s seen adults do to win affection. Interestingly, The Hunt’s issue with behavioral believability only applies to its adults. The children are more well observed. Clara’s lie feels like the truth: We can see where it comes from in her hurt, anxious young psyche. But as soon as it’s released into the world, the story’s grown-ups become cogs in a plot machine. Hilde (Lolita Chakrabarti) and Per (Howard Ward) — the headmistress of the preschool and the board member who functions as its “child safety officer” — begin the trend of relentlessly leading the witness in their questioning of Clara. Despite the gravity of the situation, the ways in which they put words in the child’s mouth, sideline Lucas, and immediately escalate the situation to full Code Red feel crude and forced. Meanwhile, it’s equally awkward that Lucas hardly seems able to put two words together in the face of Clara’s accusation, other than repeatedly asking if he can just “talk to her” (a request not likely to get a good response). Even when Clara’s mother, Mikala (MyAnna Buring; this show is full of killer cheekbones), directly asks him, “Did you do something to her?” Lucas just stares gravely into the middle distance. I don’t usually quote Nancy Reagan, but just say no!
Perhaps Farr is striving for a kind of clammed-up masculinity, a combination of pride, hurt, and stoicism that keeps Lucas’s mouth shut, even in his own defense. But for this kind of psychological constipation to feel truthful, we need to believe in Lucas as a certain kind of man — a man who was initiated into the local hunting lodge when he was 16; a man whose whole social life still consists of drinking beer and shooting deer; a man whose understanding of what it means to be a man has been shaped by a culture of bluff camaraderie, emotional repression, and ritual drinking and killing. Goold intersperses the show with theoretically menacing sequences of the menfolk singing and pumping their fists and pounding their chests — and eventually morphing into primal, nightmarish visions, their faces hidden by huge deer skulls and antlers. It’s all meant to be very brutal, very intense — but every time they burst into song, I couldn’t help thinking of this immortal tweet. They’re just … not that scary?
Although Lucas is in fact a member of this community, Menzies doesn’t quite seem to be. He can easily access pained and thoughtful, but he also comes across as too articulate by a mile. There’s a reason he often plays aristocrats — there’s something naturally patrician about him. Try as I might, I struggled to buy him as someone who would be rendered nearly mute in a crisis, or as someone who, when he’s released by the police owing to lack of evidence, would make his way straight to his buddies’ hunting lodge, elbow his way in, and ask for a beer — as if all it will take to close the hell mouth that’s been opened is a chest-out show of masculine normalcy. To Menzies’s credit, he tries to convey a Lucas whose still waters go way, way down, and there’s a sense that when he rolls up at the hunting lodge, he already knows his attempt to reenter society will be a violent failure. Still, the script continues to push him, Hilde, Mikala, her husband Theo (Alex Hassell), Lucas and Theo’s hunting pals, and essentially anyone older than 16 into actions that proceed not as much from character as from contrivance.
It’s a relief when Lucas’s 16-year-old son, Marcus (a very sympathetic Raphael Casey), enters the play. Sneaking down from “the city” where he lives with his mother to see his dad — whom he loves and in whose innocence he believes entirely — Marcus brings with him a much-needed emotional plunger. “Do you know who your daughter is?” he asks Mikala. “I told them to fuck off,” he says, explaining to his father how he handled the police who asked him if he ever experienced abuse at Lucas’s hands. “Why are you lying about my father?” he screams at Clara herself, in the town church, surrounded by the whole community. I could feel my shoulders releasing — not because the play had been holding me in the desired kind of tension but because someone was finally behaving truthfully in their given circumstances.
With Marcus in the picture, The Hunt’s final movement plays more compellingly than the rest of the production. The play even has a chance, near the end, to do something radically effective with the character, something that would elucidate the way in which the story’s real villain is the culture in which these characters have been raised, the community that puts guns in its boys’ hands and says, “Join the club. Kill for sport.” Sadly, the show doesn’t go this way: Our lens remains most firmly focused on Lucas and the individual devastation that’s been visited on him. It feels like a missed opportunity, the last on a long list.
The Hunt is at St. Ann’s Warehouse through March 24.
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