The Malady of the Soul

The Malady of the Soul tells a story of a man who cannot love. Skilled in the mechanics of sex he wants to enter the inexplicable mystery through her, he wants to learn how to love. He hires a woman to live with him in a room by the sea, hoping that he would get to experience love. The woman accepts his proposal, even though she is not a prostitute. A few days later, she tells him he is not capable of loving her, because he suffers from a “malady of the soul”. The man nevertheless wants to try and for the first time in his life see a woman in all her mystery. A touching play about two people who meet by accident and are only capable of a physical contact is permeated with the feeling of alienation and isolation, inability of human communication, a sense of loss and detachment from one’s own soul, so typical of the modern world, but at the same time not alien to the millennia of the patriarchal society in which a woman is deprived of her wholesomeness, and a man, consequently, of his manhood.

The Malady of the Soul was conceived on the motifs in two literary pieces that overlap in unexpected ways, written by two famed authors – a novella The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras and the story The Fisherman and His Soul by Oscar Wilde. It rarely happens that two authors from such different times and in such different genres tackle the same topic so similarly. They speak of a man’s incapability to have a contact with a woman, which the production interprets through man’s patriarchal look of a woman. The man, because of his forced authority slices a woman into individual fragments, functions, from fascination to a disgusting image that emerges in very different forms, from a prostitute to a mermaid, and thus deprives a woman of her original wholesomeness. The production understands this division of the male and female principle primarily on the level of the soul, because the two principles, their split and their reconnection first happen within ourselves. The production with live string music, based on the dialogue pared down to the very essence and the symbolic minimalism will be directed by Yulia Roschina.