Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
The Idiot
Prince Myshkin, a naïve, compassionate and – so it seems – almost unnaturally good in character returns from Switzerland, where he was treated for the last few years due to epilepsy, to the Russian society of aristocrats and rich merchants. On the train, he meets Rogozhin who has just inherited a vast fortune. Roghozin with his impulsive character, choleric temperament and egoism is the psychological opposite of Myshkin. He intends to use the inherited money to win Nastasya Filippovna, a well-known beauty from Saint Petersburg with whom he is obsessively in love and who has for some time been a fatal, dangerous and elusive figure in Saint Petersburg’s social life. Nastasya is a woman who inspires fascination as well as fear and contempt. At the home of a distant relative, general Yepanchin’s wife, Myshkin meets their youngest daughter, a beautiful Aglaya, who at the age of twenty, is just entering social life ...
Идиот, 1869
After the novel
World premiere
Premiere: 24. September 2022
Performance length is 3 hours and 35 minutes and has 2 pauses.
Creators
Director
Juš A. Zidar
Author of dramatisation
Eva Mahkovic
Set designer
Branko Hojnik
Costume designer
Belinda Radulović
Composer
Marjan Nečak
Language consultant
Maja Cerar
Lighting designer
Andrej Koležnik
Sound designer
Matija Zajc
Assistant to director and dramaturg
Urša Majcen
Assistant to set designer
Nina Rojc
Actors
Nastassja Filippovna Barashkova
Ajda Smrekar
Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin
Filip Samobor
Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin
Primož Pirnat
Ivan Fyodorovich Yepanchin Jožef
Jožef Ropoša
Lizaveta Prokofyevna Yepanchina
Viktorija Bencik Emeršič
Adelaida Ivanovna Yepanchina
Lena Hribar Škrlec
Aglaya Ivanovna Yepanchina
Klara Kuk k. g.
Ardalion Alexandrovich Ivolgin
Gašper Jarni
Nina Alexandrovna Ivolgina
Tanja Dimitrievska
Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin
Gal Oblak k. g.
Lukyan Timofeyevich
Jaka Lah
Ippolit Terentyev
Matic Lukšič
Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky
Boris Kerč
Background actors
Borislav Horvat, Boris Britovšek, Lovro Livk/Matjaž Rot, Mehira Jašić, Brina Šenekar
The core of the narrative is above all an intense psychological clash between Myshkin, Roghozin, Nastasya and Aglaya who are completely different in character.
Particularly relevant for today is the issue that Dostoevsky raises almost all the time:
Is there such a thing as a good man? Can the good in man survive? Can an individual control his survival instinct and subordinate his mechanisms of self-preservation to an ethical ideal, a socially responsible attitude and emphatic view of the world …?
It throws its protagonist – a kind of God’s fool, a perpetual and intact child, alienated from social conventions – into a broken society devoid of any moral authority whatsoever, into a time of the awakening of capitalism, into a time of social-climbing and strictly calculated relations, individual trauma and ideological nihilism, into a time of emptiness and fragmentation. With his directness, his involuntary indifference to existing social laws and his utter sincerity, Myshkin is able to bring into life in each individual, at least for a moment, something long lost, almost incomprehensible and at the same time sublime. An immaculately pure gaze. The radiance with which a child looks into the world ...
Opening in September 2022 on the Main Stage