The critics have been over-the-top in their enthusiasm. "Utterly essential viewing," crowed Paul Taylor of The Independent. "Admirably designed and flawlessly acted," gushed The Guardian's theatre critic, Michael Billington. "I was mesmerized," wrote The Evening Standard's Nicholas de Jongh.
Yet for Rubin, a Montreal native with more than a decade of experience in TV and film production in Los Angeles, the opening of Festen is the culmination of a long, four-year journey that started with a dinner-party conversation in late 1999.
"It's been an incredible ride, a real roller coaster," said Rubin, who grew up in Montreal but moved to the United States for college. "This was a crash course in how to be a theatre producer. It's been insane and wonderful all at the same time."
Rubin arrived in London in 1998 after a decade in Los Angeles, where she had worked in TV and film, starting as a production assistant on documentary films and ending up developing a feature-film concept and selling it to a major studio. It was at the dinner party that she got to discussing a Danish film she had just seen, Festen (The Celebration), the dark portrayal of a 60th-birthday party for a wealthy restaurateur where the family's awful secret of parental child abuse is revealed.
The film, a cult classic with the art-cinema crowd, was produced according to the "vow of chastity" of the Dogme 95 filmmakers' manifesto, the rules that eschewed the Hollywood approach to cinema by banning music, excessive props, artificial lighting and costumes and insisting that everything be filmed with a hand-held camera.
At the dinner, Rubin talked about the impact Festen had on her and how it seemed to be so well suited to the stage. "By the end of the dinner, it had been decided to do Festen as a theatrical piece."
Her first challenge was to convince Festen director Thomas Vinterberg and writer Mogens Rukov to grant her the rights. "I had to build a relationship of trust and understanding and mutual respect." It took 18 months and several trips to Copenhagen.
Vinterberg and Rukov wrote their own theatrical script, which adhered closely to the original film. But Rubin was convinced that it wouldn't work in London or other English-language markets. "It was far too busy and histrionic," she said.
With persistence, she convinced Dogme to give her the English-language rights. She then hired London playwright David Eldridge to adapt it to the stage. "He made it a more intimate mise en scène. In the film, there are 40 characters. We distilled it into 13."
The film used the hand-held camera to represent the viewpoint of a sister who had committed suicide, something that would be impossible on stage. So the decision was made to expand the role of a small girl in the film to represent the lost innocence that resulted from the child abuse and a thread that helped bind the play together dramatically.
Once the script was finished in 2002, Rubin began seeking out London theatres to launch it from. These theatres, including the Almeida and the Donmar, are non-profit institutions that are used as springboards to the commercial theatre in the West End.
