Olivier Py's first outing as Avignon festival director has been hobbled by bad weather and strikes, in the context of a bitter national renegotiation of theatre workers' contract status; it has also been dismissed as humdrum and wordy. He might be relieved then, by the awesome, air-clearing thunderclap brought about by Ivo van Hove's mammoth production of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
Van Hove puts on stage the philosophical storm surrounding the collective and the individual. He provides a fresh and complex rereading of Ayn Rand's novel, which has been in danger of becoming a one-line footnote to the neocon revolution. He also creates electrifying theatre in which word and spectacle find a perfect, symbiotic balance.
Jan Versweyveld's set, on a vast open stage in the courtyard of the Lycée Saint Joseph, resembles a recording studio, with video artists and musicians performing and live-mixing in plain sight. A mobile screen is used for aerial views of the action, and there are hand-operated pulleys galore and tables on wheels that shift the settings before our eyes.
Yet most of the four-and-a-half-hour show consists of intimate scenes involving two or three people. Rand's novel is a love-square in which femme fatale Dominique Francon serially (and destructively) tests the mettle of architects Peter Keating and Howard Roark, along with imperious media magnate Gail Wynand, who veers from misanthropy to idealism.
Roark – played with smouldering understatement by Ramsey Nasr – is often at the drawing board, seen on the video screen sketching his designs (Renzo Piano's Shard and Louis Kahn's Trenton Bath House make guest appearances as his masterpieces). He is more Melville's Bartleby than the proto-Don Draper incarnated by Gary Cooper in King Vidor's 1949 film version.
Halina Reijn's superb Francon is the beating heart of the story (a shift from Rand's Roark-centred text). Predatory, loving, enthralling, indecently carnal, she violently couples with Roark in the dark, shown on the video screen in night vision, like rutting rhinos filmed by David Attenborough. Her complicity in Roark's final act of terrorism, dynamiting his compromised Cortland housing project, becomes their biggest S&M exploit, leaving her writhing postcoitally in a pool of her own blood, Nasr's exquisite real-time drawings shredded around her in a deafening, apocalyptic orgasm.
Rand's tub-thumping anticollectivism is nuanced in (rather long) cattle-auctioneer duelling speeches by Roark and the cartoon-baddy socialist Ellsworth Toohey.Van Hove succeeds in levitating all these contradictory ideals and themes, throwing moral responsibility back where it belongs: with the audience.
• Until 19 July. Box office: +33 (0)490 141460. Venue: Lycée Saint Joseph, Avignon.
