ABOUT

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Prince Myshkin, the main character of Dostoyevsky’s novel, suffers from epilepsy, and the disease has kept him for years isolated from other human beings and from nature. As he arrives in a Swiss hospital he is finally awakened to a new and luminous conciousness of the world which surrounds him.

As a sort of experiment, Dostoyevsky sends his naïve and "pure" man, claiming that "beauty will save the world", back to a Russia of an unhappy humanity, desperate and uncertain of its own destiny. Myshkin’s fresh ingenuity changes the relationas between the men and the women he meets, but in the end, the web of their relations surrounds him to the point of suffocation. Dostoyevsly takes us along on this failed experiment as if he were talking about us, human beings unable to see beyond our own condition, prisoners of our own mediocrity. Trying to create a theatre performance from a great novel like The Idiot without betraying neither its sense nor its story, has been and extraordinary and complex journey - possible only thanks to the dedication of the actors and the entire team. And if there is, unavoidably, some betrayal, I believe that this betrayal has allowed us to remain faithful: to explore this meeting of Myshkin, the naïve outsider, with a world which does not want to be saved.

Anna Stigsgaard