Dämonen - Schedule, Program & Tickets

The Tsar has lost a war in Crimea and it is becoming clear that he will not be able to maintain his absolutist rule much longer. He still tries to make concessions and reforms, but the society that Dostoyevsky describes in his 1871 novel THE DEMONS is already largely disintegrating.
Such times are a grateful backdrop for comedy, because there are few things funnier than watching people trying to follow rules that have lost their meaning. So the rich widow Varvara tries to marry off her son Nikolai Stavrogin to the daughter of another rich lady. Since Nikolai obviously had a short affair with Varvara's foster daughter Dasha while on a trip, Varvara comes up with the idea of getting Dasha out of the way by marrying her off to the much older Stepan Verkhovensky, who is emotionally and financially dependent on her. How this wedding doesn't happen on the appointed day is pure tabloid.

At the same time, THE DEMONS are a tragedy of ideas. In view of the crumbling order, socialists, nihilists, Western-minded liberals and religious nationalists are hostile to one another. Dostoyevsky's novel prefigures the horrors of Soviet communism, as well as the Orthodox-based nationalism that is currently holding us in suspense. And at the end there is the confession of the main character Nikolaj, who pushed the experiment with a life of absolute individual freedom to a frightening conclusion.

Subject to change.