2023
No matter how strongly contemporary society aspires toward ideals of collectivity and solidarity, it remains deeply embedded within a culture shaped by individualism and self-interest. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that the neoliberal narratives that have defined recent decades are becoming increasingly exhausted.
The figure of Don Juan is profoundly ambiguous. While commonly understood as the archetype of the sexist seducer, he can also be read as someone ahead of his time or as an individual unwilling to submit to externally imposed rules. In this interpretation, Don Juan was approached as a fundamentally narcissistic figure. His narcissism, however, was not rooted in self-love but rather in its inverse: a form of compensation that both concealed and intensified self-destructive impulses.
Rather than being driven by a passion for conquest, this Don Juan was motivated by a desire to feel anything at all. The production imagined a Don Juan struggling with depression, unable to find a language capable of articulating contemporary experience while simultaneously trapped within a world constructed entirely from language—specifically, the elaborate, extended, and deliberately anachronistic phrases of Molière’s text.
This tension between contemporary sensibilities and inherited dramatic form became central to the production. Rather than modernizing the text, the staging embraced the friction created by its historical language. The sense of being imprisoned within form mirrored the character’s own inability to escape himself.
An equally important influence was the aesthetic of post-internet chaos: an endless chain of references leading only to further references, without any stable point of arrival. This circularity echoed Don Juan’s pursuit of freedom, a search that ultimately revealed itself as another form of entrapment.
CREDITS
Director: Mateusz Staniak
Cast: Danai Chatzipetrou, George Dhauw, Dominik Dos-Reis, Victor IJdens, Michael Lippold
Set design: Zaza Dupont
Costume design: Vienna Pieterse
Light design: Zaza Dupont, Johannes Zotz
Musical direction: George Dhauw
Video: Zaza Dupont
Dramaturgy: Mehdi Moradpour
Assistant director: Christian Feras Kaddoura
Assistant stage design: Max Manderbach
Assistant costume design: Lara Suppe
Soufflage: Jutta Schneider
Speech coaching: Roswitha Dierck
Stage manager: Christina Baston
Trainee Dramaturg: Darius Hartwig
Trainee Costume Designer: Lina Gausmann
Supertitle manager: Gianluca Elbert / Holger Rademacher
Photos Jörg Brüggemann