Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary, that eternal character of world literature, is the same Madame Bovary in Nebojša Pop Tasić’s adaptation who both in the time when she was created and now remains Madame Bovary, Emma, who because of her unfulfilled yearning tragically ends her destined role of a country wife, mother, and lover. It is an honestly and compassionately told story about smallness, desperate longing, stupidity, narrow-mindedness, cruelty, comical tragedy … If we understand Emma and her fellow humans as people close to us, similar to us, if we recognise ourselves in them, then we don’t have to understand them. Then we feel them, as our counterparts. Because, as the author of the adaptation says, the situations, the people, and their reactions change very little throughout history. Humans don’t want to change, re-educate, become better. People live in an eternal present. However, Flaubert didn’t write to change the world. He wrote because he wanted to be – honest. He found human helplessness and limitations at the same time sad and funny. His seeing and feeling the world is a mixture of satire and empathy, satirical empathy towards human beings.
This adaptation of Flaubert’s novel is a theatrically interesting rendition of an epic work as a concise questioning about the world in which we live, a world which has maimed not only the soul of Emma, but that of almost every human, has placed barriers between a human and the key questions of one’s existence and has thus pushed one into the state of spiritual impotency. In the agony of the aimless search we gasp for the material, instant pleasures and hope that we can, at least for a moment, forget the banality of our lives and fill our inner emptiness. Flaubert himself said: »I deny that Emma Bovary is a monstrous creation of my degenerate imagination. Monstrous she may be, but it was not I who created her. Our world, yours and mine, was what created her. Out there, there are thousands of Emma Bovarys whose life was my inspiration.« The play – which was the SNG Nova Gorica debut for Yulia Roschina – is a welcome performance for those who love world literature classics, as well as high-school audiences.