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the one hand, the fifth act caused a scandal and led to the play being banned with its "praise to hypocrisy"and Don Juan's transformation into a false believer. This end lowers the curtain over the mask of hypocrisy, which Don Juan is forced to put on in order to survive, whereas the other, official end of the play, is the one slightly "dues ex machina" end in which the Commadator's statue comes to life and Don Juan is rightfully punished for his sins, and thus heavenly justice and t(h)e(le)ological order are satisfied. In your production, the "culmination" seems to take place in the moment of Don Juan's transformation into a hypocrite, when he Joins the religion of the new era. In your Don Juan, this creature of transgression and anti-conformism par excellence seems to get stuck, closed in the world of the collective hypocrisy. I believe that for somebody as sincere as Don Juan accepting the state of hypocrisy is a huge problem. I don't see him as a liar, it's just how he thinks and feels at a given moment. In the end he acts in accordance with his nature. And he is defeated by the fact that he must hide behind the veils of hypocrisy. I enjoyed his ideas. He is seducing Donna Elvira. He would do anything to make her marry him. And why Donna Elvira of all women? Because she has promised herself to somebody else. To God. So he sets a big goal for himself. He succeeds in winning over the girlfriend of the Almighty, no more no less, it is clear that it is not easy for a person like him to accept the role of a hypocrite. That is something any fool could do. Everyone is now playing the role of hypocrite more or less successfully. The greatness is in doing things differently. The way in which he describes disjoining the new era religion is a terrifying monologue. From the very first moment it sounded like a fascist insanity to me. The sentence this monologue ends with is: "Only with the help of hypocrisy can one cope with the vices of the time we live in."l believe that this sentence must have had resounded powerfully at the time when it was written, and I know that its resounding even more powerfully today. One can almost not imagine Don Juan without his servant, Sganarelle. The Don Juan- Sganarelle relation is one of the most fruitful and most ambivalent relations in this Moliere's play, with many-layered meanings lending themselves to many different Interpretations. It is a relation which contains in itself the eternal story of the "master-servant" relationship which I believe you wanted to re-examine in your production. Moliere's play ends with a line for Sganarelle who is left without his salary in the end. In your production, Sganarelle is played by a woman, the actress Irena Ristik. Could you tell us something about this? This casting has set the biggest trap which closed on my legs several times during the work on the play. From the very beginning I knew exactly what I did not want to get from the master-servant relationship, And certain sentences that attempted to be socially witty almost cut me like a razor. I didn't want a master-servant relationship based on the social moment. The rich and well-fed and the poor and hungry, who's witty at that. This was driving me crazy. 1 decided to have Irena Ristik play Sganarelle primarily because I thought that Don Juan needed a strong servant, not someone that would serve and help him, but rather someone that would obstruct his actions. On the other hand, with the change of Sganarelle's sex

I got a new quality, a woman. And thus I got the two halves, that make one whole when put together - BODY. SCIENCE. PERFECTION. He is the instinct, she is the reason. The struggle is internal. 1 do not have problems with the others, I have problems with myself. The forbidden and the allowed are in us. What is good and what is bad, the eternal struggle of the two equally strong ideas, to fall in love with Sganarelle, the possibility that Sganarelle Is the true one, all these were concepts we discussed a lot. Of course, what was crucial was to make it a live character, not a metaphor that no one could play or see. I have to admit that the text and the character resisted and fought, and that in that unsparing struggle both sides were victorious and defeated. At the time when it was written, Don Juan was considered to be a dangerous play and therefore censured and removed from the Palais Royal repertoire, after only 15performances. Is Don Juan still dangerous, today? Who is afraid of Don Juan and what does this play challenges you with, here and now? Don Juan was a dangerous play because it showed the hypocrisy, the false belief and the double standards of a class that was ruling the state. I believe that today hypocrisy goes handln hand with the class that rules a country. They simply seem to be made for each other. And I am not talking about any particular state or country, but rather about the new democratic orders with hypocrisy and double standards hiding behind them. In this sense Don Juan is harmless today, because even the children know that the king is naked. The question is why we accept that as a principle, why we do not fight against it. The interview was conducted by Despina Angelovska, dramaturgist IN PURSUIT OF DONJUAN A fragment of an unfinished love process... Despina Angelovska, dramaturgist ...Before we began working on Don Juan, our references were stereotypes which we lost on the way. All that was left of Don Juan were his wetfootsteps on a Sicilian beach and an occasional stranded, abandoned woman... Molière's seducer, Don Juan, looks to us as if constantly on the run, he is a runner, a nomad, a vagrant. This cult character who seems to be prone to numerous interpretations, flows, like water, down our fingers. Starting from a whole array of mistresses and wives Don Juan multiplies his world and turns it into a polytopia. Don Juan does not have his I, says Kristina Kristeva in Love Story. From one scene to the other, from one woman to the other, it's as if Don Juan has no interior except the one portrayed by his flights and... his countless lodgings, he is a multitude, polyphony. Don Juanism and libertinism are an attempt to turn life into art, an aspiration to make a form, a game, pleasure out of existence. Pleasure on a journey through the unknown - Don Juan rehearsals. Exciting roaming through the labyrinths of seduction, following Don Juan, that is Nikola Ristanovski who, in his quest, keeps changing faces, masks, registers, strategies, directions... Don Juan, lecher, libertine, seducer, atheist, iconoclast, non-believ-