LEV DODIN / MALY TEATR

“The most dangerous thing with Dostoevskij is to believe that you have understood how to interpret him. His mysticism is in fact based on the impossibility of understanding human nature: he seeks to ask questions, but within each question there is hidden another. For the actors it is a human and intellectual torture, the same that drove the author. It takes a certain dose of masochism to understand yourself.”

Lev Dodin


Three years of rehearsal, more than 30 actors in a show that lasts a full eight hours – when Lev Dodin began the collaboration with his actors that would result in the adaptation for the theatre of Fyodor Dostoevskij’s The Devils, they started by reading the entire work aloud twice, as a group, to avoid the trap of each actor thinking only of the character he would be portraying. Mr. Dodin wanted everyone to keep in mind the enormous complexity of Dostoevskij’s creations, who, as Mr. Dodin explained, when they try to understand their relationships with
other characters, are in reality trying to understand their relationship with themselves.

The simple and breath-taking scenery of Eduard Kocergin complements and illustrates the bitter struggles of Dostoevskij’s nihilistic terrorists driven to self-destruction, as the elements rise up and sink down in almost musical fashion that sometimes falls with the rush of a guillotine and at other times opens visions of a shadowy descent into the inferno.

PRODUCTION DATES
Braunschweig, Germany, Festival of Braunschweig, 1991
St. Petersburg, Russia, 1991
London, Great Britain, Barbican Center, 1999
Milan, Italy, 2000

Lev Dodin
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