The Damned (Les Damnés), Barbican Theatre

Ivo van Hove, perhaps the world’s most in-demand theatre director, has only just launched his production of All About Eve in the West End – but he’s also coming back to the Barbican, London’s biggest and best hub of ambitious international theatre, this summer. A big dose of added excitement will be van Hove’s collaboration, for the first time with la Troupe of Paris’s famed Comédie-Française, who are in London for the first time in over 20 years.

Together, they’ll present van Hove’s adaptation of Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film The Damned. With a company of 30 actors and technicians, prominent use of live and recorded film, it looks likely to be another epically ambitious and technically impressive production on the Barbican stage, performed in French with English surtitles.

Van Hove is, by now, as well known for his penchant for reworking classic films by the likes of Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Billy Wilder and, indeed Visconti, having previously adapted 1949's Obsession, which played at the Barbican with Jude Law in 2017.

The story, harrowing and contemporarily relevant, concerns a prominent German industrialist family, the Essenbecks, who reluctantly become complicit Nazi colluders as the regime gradually gains power. It deals with the disintegration of society, morality, and the grand questions familiar to Greek and Shakespearian tragedy, in a way that van Hove clearly believes speaks to our time.

The Damned premiered at 2016’s Festival d’Avignon, and subsequently at the Comédie-Française and in New York last year and has gained stellar notices from the Guardian to the New York Times. For those who want to avoid missing out, get booking - the show runs for only five nights.