Only an ensemble with Dostoevsky in the bloodstream and confidence in the audience's pre-understanding can make such an idiosyncratic interpretation.
The novel's many wanderings are erased, as is almost all the text.
The huge character gallery is slimmed down to four artists, who enter into the clownery's different roles.
Ingeborga Dapkunaite dazzles like a big-eyed prince Myshkin, a combination of Linus on the line and Charlie Chaplin wearing plum tops and nonsense language in falsetto.
The other roles show evidence of both the clown's and the story's complexity and duality between evil, goodness and the middle ground in between.
Pavel Scemchenko's stage design is a surreal dream, saturated with video projections and animated installations that more or less subtly refer to the novel.
Despite the set's
relatively free approach, there is a basic tone that is understandable, it moves between furious ecstasy and poetic beauty.
The triangle drama between Myshkin, his dark reflection Rogozhin and the femme fatale Nastasia is pure and easy to absorb.
The only thing that is a pity is that we are not allowed to sit in the salon to be surrounded by this work of art.
Mattias Andersson has also taken his own grip on the Idiot.
True to his habit, he has chosen a classic story to examine the present where we are.
In this case, the goodness is put under the microscope.
David Dencik has the big eye in common with his Russian counterpart.
Through this naked staging that represents Sweden, he walks with a naive and sincere belief in the good, lovable but ridiculed.
Goodness provokes everyone, from middle class to paperless.
Dencik's Myshkin may not be a clown, but he is a punching bag, handing out his last pennies from his plastic bag.
Goodness is doomed to fail.
Is it still worth a try?
What remains to be seen on Lessingtage
is now, among other things, a German and a Dutch Ibsen interpretation as well as a Spanish little gem in which the softcore actress Eva Lyberten looks back on her life to the notes of soft saxophone.
So take care - even if digital theater festival is not the same as theater for real, you still get both a scent of theater and of Europe!
Right now we are starving on both!
In the video you can see a little of the two different versions of The Idiot.