Sylvain Creuzevault Demons

Based on the work by Fyodor Dostoevsky

[Theatre]

After his exploration of Faust’s myth, Sylvain Creuzevault continues his partnership with the Festival d’Automne by tackling Demons, Dostoevsky’s dizzying political and philosophical fresco. The aim of this new production is once again to put up a dialectic of laughter and dread on the frontier between revolution and spirituality.

Since 2009 and Notre terreur, which plunged us deep into the depths of the French Revolution, Sylvain Creuzevault has been unceasing in his efforts to sound out the “hidden chambers of our modes of social organization”. In his 2014 production, Le Capital et son singe, based on the writings of Karl Marx, he looked at this theme from a political and economic standpoint. In his 2016 production, - ANGELUS NOVUS AntiFaust, 2016 -, based on the myth of Faust, he furthered this research from the point of view of how we construct representations. In his latest production, he uses the dialogue between atheism and faith, God and Demon, as the starting point for exploring Dostoevsky’s monstrous, climatic work, Demons. Written between 1869 and 1872, the novel was driven by the artist’s rage at what he saw as the threat posed to Russia by the socialists and nihilists, and his desire to “give them what they deserved”. Dostoevsky’s work is an extremely lucid, even premonitory one. From its giddy heights, we discover the aporia of a world in which rationalism has evacuated all forms of spirituality, and in which atheist France has become the gravedigger for Russian fervor. Here, the director uses dialogues taken from the novel, translated by André Markowicz, as the basis for his production. Alongside his habitual constellation of actors, we find two stalwarts of French theatre, Valérie Dréville and Nicolas Bouchaud.
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Estimated running time : 4h (with intermission)