Bitef

er... Don Juan, the greatest seducer of all times. He is, indubitably, one of the most ambivalent characters we have inherited from the Western culture in the treatment of male sexuality. Isn't his atheism only a consequence of his eroticism? Don Juan, revolutionary. At the same time we are discovering the political and social meaning of this character heralding the French Revolution. How can we not like this nobleman who, without any sign of disgust, kisses the grimy hand of Charlotte, the peasant woman? Who is, indeed, this Don Juan?.. ... Shoshana Felman in her cult book The Scandal of the Speaking Body defines Don Juan as a "being of promises", as somebody who, whilst incessantly breaking promises, at the same time abuses the institution of promise. With the emphasis on the close link between promise and marriage, Don Juan's promise is always a promise of marriage. He toys with the holiness of matrimony and faithfulness which is "only for fools" and shows us the promise of ever-lasting love as something quite unsustainable. Unfolding before us as a drama of inner schism, a constitutive fissure in the very essence of the promise, as a drama about betrayal, seduction as non-belief, Don Juan make us face up to our own non-belief. Are the vows of love, the promise, the easiest to betray? Are love and its end free of any moral responsibility?.. In contrast with the unbearable ease with which Don Juan changes women as if they were socks, enter the stage Dona Elvira, another of his victims, almost a child. Don Juan was herfirst love (after God). In the production her feet let her down, her knees shake, she loses consciousness, crumbles like a bull mortally wounded by a torero. Seen through those eyes, Don Juan looks repulsive What does Don Juan believe in? Don Juan believes that two and two are four. He thus collects women and no beauty has the vested right to conquer his heart. Don Juan multiplies and repeats his promises and in so doing destroys their uniqueness and ability to act. In contrast with the theological order of subordination, irreplaceability and singularity of the one in relation to the other, Don Juan introduces the scandal of equality and infinite changeability of everything, women in particular. Don Juan's cruise in Molière's arithmetic was written in the middle of a deeply rooted theological and religious context. Don Juan introduces arithmetic as opposed to theology. This positivism shows us that in Don Juan's world there is no room for idolatry, either in relation to the ideology or in relation to people. At the same time this is the basis of Don Juan's principle of the quest for the absolute, elusive ideal, a quest in which all the stations are but short stops. His quest lacks the object; it is a hunt without quarry. The object of desire is unattainable... ... What is Don Juan after? The desire and its unattainable structure are Don Juan's driving force. To Don Juan seduction is speech, communication, his language is the language of desire. The satisfaction of the desire for Don Juan means entering silence and apathy. The rhetoric of seduction is crucial in Molière's text, and Don Juan is a virtuoso of theatrical rhetoric. Then, how does one become Don Juan, we wonder? By representing, depicting, speaking out his text? Is the language what makes Don Juan?

Simultaneously with Don Juan's unkept promises, Molière's linguistic act also becomes an empty promise, a sign without reference. Whilst skilfully toying with Don Juan's language of seduction, Nikola Ristanovski confronted the problem of learning that huge text by heart with prompter Žaki filling in the gaps. This gap, this pit in the languages seems to coincide with the interpretation of Don Juan's lack of faith as, first and foremost, lack of faith in the ability of the language to name and signify the truth that is conveyed... ...Milica Stojanova as an aged Dona Elvira appears in the production also as the incarnation of Don Juan's mother. Mother is a character missing from Molière's text and nothing is said about her. Mother, perhaps as the object of Don Juan's desire for the absolute, age-old and forbidden object of desires, as a dream of returning to the ideal union, the serenity of the archetypal... ...To Don Juan faithfulness equals death. Don Juan's principle of pleasure is not in vain built on the suppression of the instinct to die. Don Juan's eroticism is built, structurally and symbolically, as a relationship with death, and his crossing over from one woman to another as an escape from death. At a certain moment towards the end, when the room for escape becomes ever smaller, Don Juan confronts the aged Dona Elvira played here by Milica Stojanova. Here the encounter with mother looks like the encounter with death. It presages the final encounter with the Commander's statute, with the law of the force of death, the force of the dead, the law which is relentless, unavoidable, absolute, the final boundary of togetherness, writes Julia Kristeva. Marriage is "adorning oneself with the false glory of faithfulness" says Don Juan. The hypocrisy is sustained by false promises only. In contrast with the hidden lie of promises and faith of the wellestablished hypocrites, the heretic Don Juan openly sows promises left, right and centre only to betray them. And at the same time he points his finger at the scandal of hypocrisy as the religion of the new age. ...The law of natural numbers is possible only in arithmetic. In "life" that is in the theatre, there are no natural numbers, no final showdown and debts remain unpaid. In the finale Sganarelle is left without his well-earned salary... ...We relished the collective trip during the rehearsals, the journey through the labyrinth called Don Juan. As a follow-up to the deconstruction of the end and the disintegration of the theological order in Molière's drama, just before the curtain, a question arose: do not a sui generis rounding off of the work process and apparent winding up of the quest, the result of which is the premiere, contradict in a certain sense, the constitutive unattainability buried in the boundless lover's heart of Don Juan?