Van Hove began to adapt and direct the work of other, usually long-dead writers. “I discovered I could make much more personal work through the filter of a text by Shakespeare that was four hundred years old—that it was much more directly about me, and about my life,” he told me. “My productions are my massed autobiography: if you look at all the plays I’ve done since I was twenty, you know who I am.” In 1987, he staged Euripides’ “The Bacchae.” “The performance started with the prologue, and Dionysius completely nude,” Pol Arias, a Dutch critic, recalls. “Later, we saw him in pumps, wearing a small transparent cloth, with little wings on the back of his head—a very ambiguous character, neither good nor bad.” At intermission, Arias was approached by a couple he’d never met—van Hove’s parents. “His mother told me, ‘Let us say we are quite a bit more conservative than what our son is doing in theatre.’ I answered that there was no need to be ashamed—that they could be proud of what their son was doing, because he was a little genius.”

More recently, he and Versweyveld have staged versions of movies, with adaptations of films by Antonioni, Bergman, and Cassavetes. “When you get to do a movie script onstage, it is like a world première,” van Hove told me. “It is like you get to be the first director to do ‘Hamlet.’ You have to invent a theatrical world for the first time.”

For Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers,” which van Hove directed in 2009, he set himself the challenge of representing death onstage in an honest way. “Death is always nothing in theatre—it is very difficult to do,” he said. His father had recently died, and his memories of that experience guided his vision of the central character, Agnes, who is an artist succumbing to cancer. As Agnes, Chris Nietvelt flung herself around the stage, smearing her body with Yves Klein-blue paint. Lying lifeless, she was stripped naked and washed by her maid. “I had her die twice—once the way you want to die, like my father died, with people all around him, caring for him,” van Hove said. “And then there is the other moment of the horrific death struggle—alone. The way I am afraid it will be.” Nietvelt said of van Hove’s methods, “We go very far, physically, mentally. But that is the way we want to make theatre. It is what we call, in Dutch, waarachtig. It means something that’s not true but feels so true that you believe it. And that truthfulness can also be conveyed by your body.” Nietvelt added, “I never fall on my knees in normal life. I fell on my knees, I think, five hundred times for Ivo.”

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In the mid-nineties, his productions came to the attention of Jim Nicola, of New York Theatre Workshop. Nicola began inviting him to remount his productions of works by O’Neill, Williams, and other American playwrights, but with American actors instead of Dutch ones. The young American director Sam Gold says, “It was seeing American plays filtered through a director whose vision wasn’t mired in the conventions of contemporary American revivals—a director who wasn’t married to the text, and was trying to tell the story about how the plays related to him and his consciousness.” Gold, who won a Tony this year for “Fun Home,” is a guest director at the Toneelgroep Amsterdam this season, working on a new, Dutch-language production of “The Glass Menagerie.”

In New York, van Hove established almost an alternate company: a coterie of familiar actors, many of whom he has now been working with for years. “He never asks me to do what I can do—he leads me to do things I didn’t know I could do,” the actress Elizabeth Marvel told me. In his 2010 production of “The Little Foxes,” at New York Theatre Workshop, Marvel was directed to play Regina as someone whose anger at her relatives was so intense that she seemed on the verge of losing all self-control. “We were surfing this crazy Jungian tidal wave,” she said. “It was hypersexual. I would literally climb the wall, and hump the wall. It is hard to explain. It is a dream state that is more real than reality that I sometimes find myself in, that Ivo helps create.” When the show ended, Marvel said, it was disorienting to work again with more conventional directors: “I remember Neil Armstrong talking about what it was like when he returned from space, how it took him a very long time to reassimilate. The earth was not what he knew it to be anymore—he knew there was this whole other realm. That is very similar to my experience with Ivo.”

In 2005, Hans Kesting, who has played many important roles in van Hove’s productions, played Petruchio in “The Taming of the Shrew.” In a scene in which the title character, Katherina, was meant to be enraged, the actress playing her, Halina Reijn, stood on a table, screaming. “In rehearsal, we were pushing to the limits,” Kesting told me. “And Ivo said, ‘Something should happen that she can’t hold it in anymore. Her anger is not sufficient anymore, screaming is not sufficient, she is so frustrated now. What should she do now?’ ” Jan Versweyveld supplied an answer: “She should pee on the table.” Kesting told me, “It was water, of course—we had to find some sort of contraption to put on her.” In an added degree of boundary crossing, Kesting licked up the urine. The staging wasn’t merely shocking, Kesting said, for it wittily captured the delirious one-upmanship of Katherina and Petruchio. “In the show, it was always such a strong moment,” he said.

Physical injuries are not uncommon among van Hove’s actors. Joan MacIntosh still sees a chiropractor for a neck injury that was exacerbated by the demands of playing Alice James in Susan Sontag’s “Alice in Bed.” She spent the whole play in a specially constructed chaise longue that was molded to her body but off-kilter, so that her pelvis was permanently cocked at an odd angle. It was palpably clear to the audience that Alice, though reclining, was not relaxed. MacIntosh has no complaints: “I would do anything Ivo asked me to do that was humanly possible onstage.”

Van Hove does not choreograph his fights. In “Scenes from a Marriage,” an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s TV miniseries, which he directed in New York last year, three pairs of actors—each representing the same married couple—engaged in fifteen-minute brawls. Alex Hurt, one of the actors playing the husband, Johan, told me, “It was one of the most unsafe, and particularly fantastic, things I have ever done in a play. Ivo just said, ‘Now you kill her—kill her with your words.’ So we’d all be veining at the neck, screaming our heads off, going at it. And then he would go up to the wives and say, ‘Kill him. Now you kill him.’ ”

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With Versweyveld and Tal Yarden, the videographer, van Hove often attempts to subvert received wisdom about famous works, sometimes to very controversial effect. He directed a Dutch-language production of “Rent,” in 2000. In the original production, which ran on Broadway for twelve years, the character of Mimi almost dies but is miraculously resurrected. In van Hove’s pitiless version, Mimi dies, with her last moments represented on video. Van Hove’s iconoclasm is, in part, a function of his position as a native speaker of Flemish working principally in Dutch, which has relatively few speakers and a limited literary canon. Just as, when working in English, van Hove feels no duty to Elia Kazan in his interpretation of the works of Tennessee Williams, he does not feel bound to the text of an English-language masterpiece when he is using a Dutch translation. There is inevitably a poetic diminishment when Shakespeare is rendered in a language other than English, but there can also be a recovery of a play’s elemental drama. Van Hove’s “Roman Tragedies” eliminates the first scene of “Antony and Cleopatra,” which includes a voluptuous embrace and depicts “the triple pillar of the world / transform’d into a strumpet’s fool.” But this elided verse is later enacted, during Antony’s passionate leave-taking of Cleopatra before battle. As Antony dresses, the couple laugh and fumble cupidinously; they kiss passionately for a full minute as the music—Bob Dylan singing “Not Dark Yet”—surrounds them, and Antony’s advisers look sternly on. Joe Melillo, of BAM, said of the production, “People couldn’t talk at the end—the death of Cleopatra was so emotional that people were sobbing.” Van Hove’s “Kings of War,” which had its première in Vienna in June, eliminated the buildup to the War of the Roses—a cut that an English director would probably have found harder to make. What remained was “like watching a great cable miniseries,” Sam Gold said. “It has this populist thing—this page-turning energy. You feel like you are watching Netflix, and when you get to the end of ‘Henry V’ you just hit ‘Next Episode.’ ”