The East has come to the West

The Berlin Deutsches Theater hosted the Radar Ost festival, whose name can be translated as “Looking to the East”, for the fifth time. He introduces Germany to the theater of Eastern Europe. This year’s program includes performances from Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Slovenia. Tells Alla Shenderova.

Many participants of the “Radar”, invented by the curator Birgit Lengers, are well known to us. Previously, Russian theaters also participated in it: in 2020, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Gogol Center released the premiere of his Decameron here. In general, the festival is in many ways close to the Youth Theater Forum of the CIS countries, the Baltics and Georgia, which was once invented by the creator of the Chekhov Festival, Valery Shadrin, who died last fall.

The main blockbuster of Radar this year was The Dogs of Europe, a play by Nikolai Khalezin staged at the Free Theater in Minsk in 2020. The theater has since emigrated to London, and a new version of Dogs was released recently at the Barbican Centre. Written in Belarusian, translated into Russian by the author himself, now published in almost all languages, the grandiose dystopia of Olgerd Bakharevich begins with a confession of dislike for his native Belarusian speech, non-native Russian, English (hereinafter everywhere) and ends with a dictionary of a language invented by the hero – balbuty . The action moves between 2019, when the children at school encapsulate messages for the future, and 2049, when a New Reich is established in Eastern Europe. By that time, Belarus as a country will disappear from the world map, and there will be no one to read the messages – humanity will lose interest in this.

A bitter, caustic mixture of six stories in which the author weaves cities and plots, talking about national and human dignity and states that do not need the past, Nikolai Khalezin and his actors turned into a multimedia fresco. In it, among other things, to the White Dews, the inhabitants of dilapidated houses lost among forests and fields (excellent work with the video – Roman Lyuby, Richard Williamson), there is a mustachioed nobleman in a white tunic. The new ruler, reminiscent of all the Romanovs at once, quotes Diderot and Mandelstam, invites everyone to speak Russian (the main part of “Dogs of Europe” is in Belarusian with subtitles) – “otherwise you will be like Americans.” Throughout the intermission, the hero, stripped naked, runs around the stage, thus moving to another part of Europe and either parodying or repeating fragments of the famous performances of Jan Fabre. The second act is apocalyptic sketches from the life of the inhabitants of the West of the future. Bookkeepers demonstrate complete bodily freedom and an equally complete disregard for books and any intellectual activity. The hero, wandering around Berlin and Hamburg, is trying to find traces of the manuscript of the Belarusian writer – either killed or killed himself. Everything ends with a big bonfire of books, which does not bode well for mankind.

The play “Medea S01E06” directed by Paata Tsikolia was staged at the Royal Quarter Theater in Tbilisi. The Royal Quarter is one of the most artistic places in Tbilisi. The performance was delayed. However, the Georgian artists played under force majeure circumstances, on an almost empty stage: their scenery could not arrive. The mixture of physical theater demonstrated by the choir and Medea herself (Ekaterina Demetradze), the psychological performance of Gia Burdzhanadze as Medea’s father, and the sharp eccentricity with which Sandro Samkharadze exists as a brother, came out not so natural. Although the plot of the ancient myth, turned by the director into a tragedy about how the Colchian Medea betrayed her father, killed her brother and betrayed Fleece to the Argonauts, seems topical. In the finale, footage of recent protests in Tbilisi appears on the big screen, becoming a continuation of the conversation about national dignity.

“Danse Macabre” by Vlad Troitsky, whom we know, and the performance group Dakh Daughters, which was born from his theater “Dah”, and “Human?” duet mariia & magdalina (Marusya Ionova and Nadya Golubtsova – also artists of “Dakh”) – attempts to tell about what is happening today with Ukraine through songs. It is difficult to surpass the “Daughters of Dah” in temperament and passion. The name of Christina Kirik, who wrote the music for “Human?”, is definitely worth remembering. She gave the texts about the tragedy, which cannot yet be comprehended, the strongest musical form.

The main event of the festival was “Ha*l*t”, shown in the small hall, chamber in form, but large in strength. Director Tamara Trunova and the team of the Kyiv theater “On the Left Bank” made it in co-production with Deutsches Theatre. This is an autobiography: on February 24, 2022, the theater was supposed to start rehearsals for Hamlet. The show had to be frozen. And then, already during rehearsals in Berlin, “Hamlet” turned into “Ha * l * t” (in German “stop”, in English “stop”). Two letters have disappeared from the name – “me”. What is happening with this “I” today? Seven actors of the theater “On the Left Bank” talk about their sad adventures, without giving them an emotional assessment. They either turn to the public, demonstrating a temperament unthinkable even for German expressionism, or they show enviable dignity, explaining for the hundredth time that yes, they are refugees, but not prostitutes, but actors. In the most powerful episode, they feel their way through the hall to the stage – with suitcases and blinders over their eyes. The guide, who is also the ghost of Hamlet Sr., accompanies the movement with a story about the painting by Pieter Brueghel “The Parable of the Blind”.

Tamara Trunova manages to combine episodes of different genres into a powerful statement. The world theater has not yet come up with anything more accurate about the events of 2022. The most amazing thing is that the performance does not put pressure on the viewer at all. It is made and played with that virtuoso skill in which efforts are imperceptible. It seems that “On the Left Bank” really can do everything. Except for one thing: to believe that what is happening to them in the last year is not a dream.