Life with an Idiot
Collection:CSM Museum & Study Collection
Date: 2003
Designer: Fred Meller
Dimensions:
Other: 19.5 x 77 x 34 cm (7 11/16 x 30 5/16 x 13 3/8 in.)
Medium: Card, plastic and foam board
Object number: TH.2012.268.CC
DescriptionModel for production of 'Life with an Idiot'.
The Royal National Theatre Studio and the Gate Theatre 2003
Director Ben Harrison
Designer Fred Meller
Lighting Design Natasha Chivers
The design for Life with an Idiot was part of the UK’s winning national exhibit 2D>3D at the 2003 Prague Quadrennial.
An adaptation of Victor Erofeyev’s short story, transposed to a chic contemporary minimalist flat, the show follows the invasion of a couple’s life by an idiot which they must take into their home as punishment for a unnamed misdemeanour at the husband’s work.
The production employed a kind of coarse puppetry to explore the sexual anarchy and violence of Vova, the Idiot, who terrorises the couple and drives them apart, first seducing the wife, Masha and then the husband, ‘I’.
The perfectly white environment, created with an unnervingly low ceiling by the designer Fred Meller, was by the end of the piece desecrated by shit, blood, and semen, represented by chocolate, tomato ketchup and porridge. Moving from its beginnings in a suffocatingly chic restraint, the production ends in murder, rape and necrophilia, and the committing of the husband to the lunatic asylum from which Vova was brought.
The Royal National Theatre Studio and the Gate Theatre 2003
Director Ben Harrison
Designer Fred Meller
Lighting Design Natasha Chivers
The design for Life with an Idiot was part of the UK’s winning national exhibit 2D>3D at the 2003 Prague Quadrennial.
An adaptation of Victor Erofeyev’s short story, transposed to a chic contemporary minimalist flat, the show follows the invasion of a couple’s life by an idiot which they must take into their home as punishment for a unnamed misdemeanour at the husband’s work.
The production employed a kind of coarse puppetry to explore the sexual anarchy and violence of Vova, the Idiot, who terrorises the couple and drives them apart, first seducing the wife, Masha and then the husband, ‘I’.
The perfectly white environment, created with an unnervingly low ceiling by the designer Fred Meller, was by the end of the piece desecrated by shit, blood, and semen, represented by chocolate, tomato ketchup and porridge. Moving from its beginnings in a suffocatingly chic restraint, the production ends in murder, rape and necrophilia, and the committing of the husband to the lunatic asylum from which Vova was brought.
