The Idiot Performance Reponse

My initial reaction to The Idiot was that I found myself analyzing the play in the same way that I analyze books for any literature class. I was entirely drawn in by the play, but because the matter of the story was so dense and introspective, I found it hard to focus on the performance itself, aside from the storyline and messages that it was trying to convey. In that sense, I found that the play did indeed reach me. Having read Dostoevsky before (although not this particular selection), I found myself relating once again to the bitter melancholy that flavors most of his pieces. The topics of the depravity of mankind, atheism, nihilism and religion, and social movement are all riveting discussions among themselves in an English class, but while stimulating, they are mind-drudgingly heavy, and ones that I try to reserve to English class alone. On that note, I found the play a little boring. I admit I was drawn in, but on a Saturday night, I am usually in the mood for something fun and intellectually shallow, whereas in this situation I was placed into the opposite.
Regardless, the show left me with emotions of melancholy and bitterness, like all great works of literature do. Perhaps the most striking difference between reading about this topics was seeing them acted out before my eyes. This was the most rewarding part of this performance from my perspective. Rather than forging the “as if” in my brain, I could see how the often futile nature of life affected the individual characters, and my mind was able to think about other things, not having to create an image for myself. The most stirring of these images were the expressions on Myshkin’s face. He represented the good man struggling through the tides of depravity and forlornness that affect that vast reaches of mankind. His face was constantly fighting back a childish smile, but when he faced the decisions that grew out of his multiple loves, the hard and cold nature of life was particularly evident in his crushed and defeated smile, yearning for a life in which all could be as good as he.
On that same note, I think the actor that played Myshkin stood out above the rest. In the beginning of the play, it seemed like he was forcing some sort of foolish ignorance of the world and its ways, but by the end of the play I realized that that is exactly what he was trying to convey: a confused, helpless, sick man trying to make good out of a stirring situation. After him, I think the actress that played Nastasya Filippovna stood out as the 2nd best in the show to me. The way she conveyed her character as a woman trying to make something better out of a life she knew she had lost any semblance of goodness.
I don’t know that I would recommend this play to my friend’s if they were looking for something to be entertained by. However, I would recommend this to someone in a dark, introspective mood, searching for higher answers. Disjointly, if there was one “problem” I had with the play, it was that it was very hard to keep track of the very Russian names, and so I found myself often confused by who was who.