Don Juan

The tragicomedy of Dom Juan was first staged in 1665 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris. In it, Molière shows an irresistible seducer, liar, cheater and murderer who doesn’t know the sense of guilt; for him, neither sin nor repentance exist, he acts as his selfishness dictates and pays no heed to the presumed will of the heavens. Among those who have succumbed to his charm is Donna Elvira: he dragged her out of a convent with the force of his passion and married her. But as his passion withers soon after each conquest, he starts looking at other women after the wedding. Elvira’s brothers follow the seducer who has dishonoured the marriage and shamed Donna Elvira; and heaven itself demands payment for the debauched life.

The staging asks questions about the individual’s freedom in the modern world and the limits of this freedom in the framework of contemporary morals. These frames should be a space in which a life worth living is possible. Don Juan doesn’t know them: he is the embodiment of wildness, egotism, narcissism, loyalty to himself alone, of everything that the civilised society has been striving to crush or at least control. He behaves like there is nothing above him and perhaps this is what makes him so attractive. Don Juan certainly isn’t a man whom the society can take as a role model if it doesn’t want to get caught in its own noose. But the time in which we live mercilessly produces and reproduces more and more Don Juans. How to maintain human as well as personal integrity, when the world, in the name of freedom, continues to lean more and more towards Don Juan’s values? All these are the questions for our first time collaborator, young director Daniel Day Škufca.