Performances

Jacques And His Master - Milan Kountera

The play refers to the age of Enlightenment, little before the French Revolution, and it is based on the novel of the philosopher Denis Diderot, 'Jacques le fataliste et son ma?tre'. On the one hand we have a pleasant scenic game where Jacques and his master revive and relive their past and their love affairs and on the other we have an intense criticism in every form of oppressive power, in every stagnant society and in every man who refuses participating in the social struggle. Jacques and his master are two symbolic figures, upon which the recycling of the story and the human course in our planet is based. Jacques is the fatalist who believes that his presence in this life is prefabricated somewhere in the skies, giving him the freedom to treat the ethics of life with unconsciousness and tenderness and the master is the settled materialist bourgeois who struggles through codified behaviours to interpret major unanswered questions of human fate. Both of them, are dependent, the former on the sureness of heaven and the latter on the sureness of the earthly power, and thus they have fun, live, meditate, separate, meet together and go on. Kundera, behind a carefree dialogue, comments sarcastically on the humans who want continuously to confirm themselves through irrational relations, unreasonable creeds, and illogical compromises.