The High Price of Human Freedom
The High Price of Human Freedom
Review
At one point in George Gordon Byron’s Don Juan, he says: “Be hypocritical, be careful, do not be what you have seen, but always what you see.” This raises a very important question: Who does Don Juan see around him, and how does he see himself in an environment where hypocrisy is the only measure by which social presence is judged?
Molière’s Don Juan carries a unique paradigm that remains not only in interpretations of his work, but also as a dramatic coordinate for contemporary dramatic inspirations based on that model. Vasil Vasilev’s directorial vision opens up completely different currents in Molière’s dramaturgy: his interpretation of a person’s social free-mindedness, an aspect that, at first glance, Molière explores more extensively in Tartuffe and The Misanthrope. However, Vasilev’s thoughtful directorial approach draws out the deepest semantic considerations. His Don Juan is tired, emotionally withdrawn, a former lover deeply obsessed with his memories, an emotional vessel sinking alarmingly into the sea of hypocrisy against which Molière warns us throughout his works.
Vasilev adopts a simple and clear mise-en-scène in order to open up a dilemma for us: how free have we been in our emotional constellation, and where are the secret transitions of promiscuity that ultimately lead us to the meaning of life? Vasilev is deeply focused on the precise form of the characters, which in his concept sound extraordinarily alive, but at the same time they are part of a theatrical fugue in which self-awareness carries a tragic mark.
Watching this production, one gets the impression that Don Juan has a confessional quality, yet his and the director’s transparency lead us to believe that Don Juan also possesses these traits: elegiac, distrustful, sad and self-critical. With this concept, Vasil Vasilev creates a production that captivates with its originality, significance and highly pronounced dynamism.
Don Juan, portrayed by Dejan Lilić, is, one might say, a Don Juan we have never seen before. Dejan Lilić, as a great acting talent, introduces a very delicate, subtle distance into his precise interpretation, a self-irony that makes him a Don Juan we might encounter in the twenty-first century: disappointed, dissonant, epically sad.
Moving along the fine lines of the director’s concept, Lilić speaks, feels and ultimately plays Don Juan as Molière probably wanted to write him—or perhaps did write him—and whom the director and actor have managed to read in precisely that way. Developing his character with great skill and plunging into every vertical dimension of his characteristics, Dejan Lilić reveals a palette of sensitivity that we can recognize within ourselves.
On the other hand, that aforementioned distance conveys a message that the director realizes in his interpretation of this antihero: the impossibility of rebellion in a time when hypocrisy is the primary driving force behind all social transformations. Dejan Lilić offers us a Don Juan who perfectly corresponds to the political and social ambitions of the twenty-first century, which the author of these lines often calls the “sinful” twenty-first century.
Of course, the question also arises as to how and why it is “sinful.” Is Don Juan considered a “sinner,” and therefore an antihero, both in Molière’s time and in Byron’s? At one point, Don Juan says to his servant Sganarelle: “What do I believe in? I believe that two and two are four and four and four are eight.” This means that not only was Molière pragmatic, but so too is the Don Juan of the twenty-first century.
This Don Juan stands at the beginning of the production on a staircase leading upward, toward the clouds. His hesitation in all his interactions amuses him, but also saddens him. Through this character, Dejan Lilić sends us the message that we cannot constantly justify ourselves, that we must nevertheless find a little room in our hearts for our inner freedom—the freedom we imagined but never actually achieved.
As a director with a firm concept, Vasil Vasilev also speaks in this production about dreams, about unfulfilled dreams, dreams that an unfulfilled character such as Don Juan refuses to abandon even during his spiritual decline.
Don Juan is a production filled with great acting energy. Among the outstanding performances, we should also mention Katarina Mitić Pavlović as Charlotte, whose beauty represents one of the greatest aesthetic and moral warnings in this interpretation of Don Juan; Danilo Petrović as the playful, conservatively and traditionally raised Pier; and the quietly emotional Donna Elvira, played by Maja Vukojević Cvetković, who in this directorial vision represents a clerical woman who views love and disappointment in love as a spiritual particle within the human condition.
The subtle irony of Dragiša Veljković’s Sganarelle is yet another aspect that speaks to the production’s unusual perspective. At the same time, we have the dynamic scenes involving Donna Elvira’s brothers, Don Alonso and Don Carlos, in the excellent performances of Uroš Milojević and Andrija Mitić.
The visual context of the production is shaped by exceptionally simple yet symbolically powerful scenography, dominated by stairs and a ring, which surround the justifications for all “sinful” deeds, but are also, in a certain way, the first gateway to freedom after a person’s exhaustion in the search for love, which has fallen upon the actors in the form of a torn-off seagull’s wing.
The costumes complement this visual language, containing a certain richness of colour derived from a particular period while being skilfully modernized. This beautiful visual constellation of costumes and scenography is the work of Marija Kunčeva, while the musical score, unobtrusive yet an extraordinary bloodstream running through the entire work, was composed by Milen Apostolov.
Don Juan is neither a lover of the sixteenth nor of the twenty-first century. He says: “How terrible it is to be a great lord and yet a wicked man,” and remains in the territory of ignobility, burdened by great debts and accompanied by a friend who refuses to extinguish even the small hope that remains within him.
No matter how free we are, it is still not enough. That is why this unpurified Don Juan, carrying a great burden of life, bad decisions and changes, becomes a model for the contemporary human being, who sees marriage as shackles, love as foolishness, and hypocrisy as the only way to succeed in life.
Molière’s Don Juan seems to possess a secret both to eternal forgiveness and to the eternal occupation of the human spirit. This production opens doors that have until now remained closed in the interpretation of this great classical dramatic text.
Sašo Ognenovski