Baron Munchausen

on programme

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duration 2 hours and 20 minutes with interval

premiere

18. April 2019, SNG Nova Gorica, Main Stage

about text

Baron Munchhausen is a man of travels and adventures. The adventures he’s describing go so beyond our imagination we cannot even take them as a lie. Like the one, for example, in which he shot a stag with a cherry pit, after which the animal came from the forest with a cherry tree on its head in place of antlers. The baron is married, but lives with his charming mistress. He wants to marry her, but he can’t get a divorce, because his wife and her lover oppose it. They try to have the baron declared insane based on his fantastical storytelling, so they can get a hold of his wealth. After a long struggle, the duke grants him a divorce, but because the baron comes up with another one of his stories in court, the permission is revoked: the divorce will only be valid if the baron denies all his previous statements. He does that, then takes a gun and … mysteriously disappears. 

The comical tales of Baron Munchhausen are from the core Enlightenment period. They are based on the stories of an actual soldier and adventurer that were written down by the German writer Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785; later, they saw many editions, adaptations and translations. In Slovenian we know them primarily from the adaptation for children done by Gottfried August Bürger, and as a collection of tales Lažnivi Kljukec [The Lying Kidder] by Franc Malavašič from 1856. This staging will be based on the play and screenplay by the Russian author Grigoriy Gorin, whose play Kean IV we’ve already staged in SNG Nova Gorica. The author worked in the times of Brezhnev, and it was after his script that director Mark Zaharov made one of the most successful Soviet films of all times in 1979. The film is an allegory for the hypocrisy of the Soviet society, a resistance to any deviation from the system, to individuality, let alone fantasy, dreaming or a belief in the existence of the supernatural. In the time when globalisation is turning us into the spitting image of each other, when only Hollywood still generates fantasy for us, Baron Munchhausen is a more than welcome change.

The performance was directed by Yulia Roschina, known to the SNG Nova Gorica audience for her successful stagings of the plays Madame Bovary and Why Birds Sing by Nebojša Pop-Tasić.

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