An opera singer, who was about to star in Mozart's Magic Flute for the umpteenth time, exhausted by the discipline she has imposed on herself and the repetitive exposure to the public, decides to cancel her performances and retreat to the countryside with her blind and alcoholic father. However, he has invested his entire life in her career. In their company is a doctor, a forensic pathologist, who is passionate about human anatomy but indifferent to human existence...
In his afterword, director Yiannos Perlegkas writes: "In this captivating masterpiece, with the enigmatically multifaceted title The Ignorant and the Madman, forensic pathology undertakes to dissect and decompose the most wonderful and luminous of all Mozart's operas, The Magic Flute. At the same time, it dissects with the precision of a scalpel the parent-child relationship, as well as the artist-stage-audience relationship, attributing responsibilities on both sides...".
Translator Giorgos Depastas notes about Bernhard: "Bernhard can be considered the natural evolutionary continuation of an Austrian literary tradition that can be traced to Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, Ödön von Horváth, Robert Musil, Werner Schwab, and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek: leading charismatic writers who also faced hostility and rejection from their contemporaries...".
The play was staged at the Experimental Stage of the National Theatre in February 2016 and continues at the Michalis Kakogiannis Foundation Theatre, translated by Giorgos Depastas and directed by Yiannos Perlegkas.