Demoni by Peter Stein: Masterpiece leads to masterpiece #hf10

 After a 12-hour theatre marathon, what can be said? That it was good? Good. It can. That it was rare? Also true. That it takes a director in his 70s to stage a Russian novel with such calmness, and that it takes such phenomenal actors to keep audiences glued to their not-too-comfortable seats for 11 hours, with not too many exciting scenes and surprising explosions of energy? That is the truth of the day. I Demoni, the Italian stage adaptation of Dostoevsky's revolutionary novel Demons, is the greatest theatrical extravaganza I ever saw, and at the Holland festival the actors and the few hundred spectators got away with it gloriously.

We were back in the atmosphere of the glory days of Italian cinema, when geniuses like Visconti, Fellini and Ettore Scola defined our cinema attendance. Films like Tre Fratelli and Identificatzione di Una Donna by Scola, Bertolucci's epic Novecento came back to mind because of the Italian atmosphere the actors brought to this story about the death throes of Russian revolutionaries in the late 19th century.

Little more than a piano and some indeterminate furniture were available to the players to convey Dostoevsky's masterful language.

The performance had its dips, was really slumping heavily around the fifth hour of play, but came to a fantastic climax in the last four hours of play, where even the great epilogue, a death monologue spoken by a splendid actor, kept us enthralled until the closing applause. Director Peter Stein's mastery splashed off the mass scenes, where despite an apparent chaos on stage, every word could be understood and every development followed.

So you don't often experience something like that anymore. Having eleven and a half hours in which you are inescapably rehearsed that life is meaningless, and that the only thing keeping us from suicide is the knowledge that dying makes even less sense.

Chapeau.