CREATIVE TEAM

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Text adaptation Konstantin Fyodorov

Composer Ivan Kushnir

Stage Designer and Lighting Designer Pavel Semchenko

Costume Designer Anisiya Kronidova

Video Artist Ilya Starilov

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CHARACTERS AND PERFORMERS

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Prince Myshkin Ingeborga Dapkunaite

Parfyon Rogozhin Alexander Yakin, Evgeny Tkachuk

Nastasia and Lebedev Roman Shaliapin

Aglaya and Ganya Artem Tulchinsky, Pavel Chinaryov

Despite the fact that the stage version of the novel written by Konstantin Fyodorov, includes 20 characters, the play actually engages only four actors. Together with inimitable Ingeborga Dapkunaite, who plays Prince Myshkin, on the stage are Evgeny Tkachuk, Pavel Chinaryov, Roman Shaliapin and Alexander Yakin. The director set himself the paradoxical task of staging “The Idiot” in the aesthetics of “noir” clowning. He says that “in this world, among other things, there are two things that are lost: culture of clowning and the perception of Dostoevsky as an ironic and living man.”

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All the events take place in the space created by artist Pavel Semchenko of AKHE Theatre, who often uses complex video-mapping and interaction with real objects. For Maxim Didenko, the novel has in its foreground the love triangle “Myshkin – Nastasia – Rogozhin” and those paradoxical events that we often do not notice being lost in the “accursed questions” and hopeless situations described in the novel.

“It appeared to me that we can research this novel through a keyhole, as if peeping at the last scene, when the prince and Rogozhin were sitting near the corpse of Nastasya Filippovna. I saw it in a surreal way. I have kept this vision in some kind of box in my head; I was running everywhere with it.

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"Two years ago, Vyacheslav Polunin invited me to do a show in the Circus on Fontanka. I had never met him in person, but I knew almost everything about him, because one way or another I had been engaged in clowning. We ran to his shows from the exams in the Theater Institute. He was a god for me. And here I was talking to the people who had started clowning in Russia. Then I realized what it looks like today, and wanted to have my say. It may sound naive or false, but it seemed to me that “The Idiot” by Dostoevsky is a fertile ground to say that word.

The adventure is that the people who will implement these ideas at the Theatre of Nations are no clowns at all. In some sense it may help to clear the clowning genre from some “shells” that adhered to it. An impossible task, but an interesting one.” (Maxim Didenko)

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“We are in the state of a question, not in the state of an answer. It is a cool state, there is no preaching in it. It suits me, because I feel the same way in the process of staging. There is no global response, but there is a challenge that life presents to me. It is this challenge that I interact with in the field of theatre. It is such a kind of activity the value of which I do not really realize.” (Maxim Didenko)