CREATIVE TEAM

​

Text adaptation Konstantin Fyodorov

Composer Ivan Kushnir

Stage Designer and Lighting Designer Pavel Semchenko

Costume Designer Anisiya Kronidova

Video Artist Ilya Starilov

​

CHARACTERS AND PERFORMERS

​

Prince Myshkin Ingeborga Dapkunaite

Parfyon Rogozhin Alexander Yakin, Evgeny Tkachuk

Nastasia and Lebedev Roman Shaliapin

Aglaya and Ganya Artem Tulchinsky, Pavel Chinaryov

Konstantin Fyodorov’s adaptation has twenty characters; the stage has four actors—the inimitable Ingeborga Dapkunaite as Prince Myshkin, along with Evgeny Tkachuk, Pavel Chinaryov, Roman Shaliapin, and Alexander Yakin. The director set himself a paradoxical task: to play “The Idiot” as noir clowning. As he puts it, “in this world, among other things, two things have been lost: the culture of clowning, and the sense of Dostoyevsky as an ironic, living man.”

​

The action unfolds in a space designed by Pavel Semchenko, of AKHE, a master of video mapping and of play with real objects. Didenko pushes to the foreground the triangle of Myshkin, Nastasya, and Rogozhin, and the paradoxical moments that usually get lost behind the novel’s “accursed questions” and dead ends.

“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.

​

"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)

​

“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)