Ödön von Horváth DON JUAN COMES BACK FROM THE WAR

Don Juan kommt aus dem Krieg, 1937
Drama
Translated by Urška P. Černe
Directed by Dušan Jovanović

 

Premiere: October 2012

 

 

Don Juan comes back from the Great War. He is exhausted, sad, confused, mysterious, lost. Empty. Hollow. Wherever he goes, there are women everywhere. Dozens of them.  It seems that he is the only man, left in the world now. The world is suffering from different shortages. All the women seem to know Don Juan, as well as to remember him very accurately and personally. He does not remember anything or anyone. Except for his fiancée, he abandoned and dishonoured long time ago.  Where is she now? Where is he to look for her? And is it here that his special journey – the journey of searching – begins? Don Juan is wandering among the forgotten episodes of his life. He is confronted by the memories of the others. Which of them are true and which not? Don Juan is slowly facing his own story, his own past.    

Horváth presents this play about the mythological seducer without the explicit eroticism. Persistently opposing tragic to banal. Burlesque to melancholy. Lyrical to brutal.  Drama is marked by a particular coldness.  May be it is even the coldness of Don Juan's ridicule on himself.
The fictional character of Don Juan derives from the old Spanish legend. It was first staged (before 1630) by Tirso de Molina. Since then, the figure of Don Juan has been - in one way or another - persistently appearing as in European as well as in American literature (Byron, Molière, Goldoni, Pushkin, Dumas, Rostand, Frisch, Duncan, Shaw, Williams, Bergman ...).

In most of its situations and points the Horváth's Don Juan by all means fits closely to the present time's skin.

 

Don Juan is always looking for perfection and thus for something that does not exist in this world. And every time, women would like to prove to him and themselves that he is indeed to find everything he has been searching for in this world (an excerpt from the foreword to Don Juan Comes Back from the War by Ödön von Horváth).