The backlash against the now-notorious cartoons in a Danish newspaper has been grotesquely disproportionate, but it does seem to have prompted some questions about Denmark's multicultural credentials.

So it's interesting that Festen presents a picture of a complacent, affluent Danish family who are revealed - amongst other things - to be unashamedly racist in a scene shocking enough to bring gasps of disbelief from a Birmingham audience.

It's the most immediately uncomfortable moment in a bleak and disturbing production which offers precious little in the way of comfort.

Festen is best known as an award-winning film which is probably the most famous product of the Danish school of spontaneous filmmaking, Dogme. This adaptation by David Eldridge for the Almeida Theatre, which is launching a national tour at the Rep, is as technically accomplished and heartless a piece of theatre as you could wish to see.

It takes place at a large, Chekhovian family gathering to celebrate the 60th birthday of Helge, the head of the family.

His children - Christian, a successful Parisian restaurateur, his loutish younger brother Michael and their sister Helene - gather with family and friends for the occasion, and we learn that another sister, Christian's twin, has died tragically in the previous year.

No sooner is the celebratory dinner underway than Christian rises to make a speech which contains a bombshell: he reveals that as small children he and his late sister were sexually abused by their father.

But this does not put a stop to the celebrations, which press on like an increasingly demented steamroller, with the accumulated weight of social convention and family ritual behind it.

The ritual element is likely to be perplexing for those unfamiliar wth the Danish tradition of communal singing at social gatherings - exploited by Thomas Vinterberg in the film version because Dogme rules forbid conventional musical scores.

As events spiral out of control the comedy becomes increasingly grotesque, the excellent ensemble acting more intricate.

Its blackness is mirrored in the production style - dark, windowless spaces in which walls descend and beds ascend for the needs of each scene. Sometimes scenes taking place simultaneously in different rooms are compressed into the same space.

There is a disturbing sense that there is no outside world, that this is a vision of hell as being locked in a room with other people, as in a once-fashionable play by Jean-Paul Sartre.

This has the effect of making it more difficult to identify with the universal theme of the dysfunctional family, this existing in some nightmarish other world.

The state of Denmark, perhaps, with something rotten in it.

* Running time: Two hours. Until February 18.

Terry Grimley