Inspired by the screenplay of "Festen” by Thomas Vinterberg, the performance starts from the premise of a festive family gathering: the birthday of the patriarch of a respectable bourgeois family. As they sit down to dinner, the eldest son raises a toast that shatters the celebratory convention and reveals a history of abuse and silence that runs through the entire family. From that moment on, the dinner table becomes a battlefield between memory and denial, between truth and the social mechanisms that repress it. The stage space becomes an ambiguous place, where the birthday guests are also spectators, and the performance turns into a ceremony of revelation, unfolding through a succession of show-like moments shaped by the seduction of entertainment and the violence of confession. In this way, the performance constantly moves between the intimacy of trauma and the political dimension of collective silence. "Festen" is not just the story of a family, but a radiography of how communities—whether familial, social, or institutional—protect their own secrets. The birthday becomes the context in which this complicity is exposed, and a space where the truth becomes impossible to ignore.

Presented by agreement with Nordiska ApS - www.nordiska.dk

Based on the film Festen by Thomas Vinterberg & Mogens Rukov, stage adaptation by Bo hr. Hansen.