Jews together with Palestinians

Edinburgh Theater Festival opens today

This festival is the 62nd in a row. Since post-war times, when Edinburgh first became the center of the theatrical world for a month, the scale of the festival has grown incredibly - at first the “world” included only Great Britain, then Europe, but now troupes from all continents come to Scotland, with the exception of Antarctica. The motto of the festival is “Artists without Borders”, and in the main program of Edinburgh (not to mention the off-program, “Fringe”) there are theaters from even countries at war with each other - Palestinian and Israeli, for example. The boundaries of genres are not recognized here either - the theater festival program also includes a solid list of symphony concerts, and, of course, no one discriminates against opera or ballet.

Actually, it is the musical theater that brings the most anticipated premiere at the festival this year - Matthew Bourne and his company New Adventures will show their “Dorian Gray” for the first time in Edinburgh. Bourne took the music of Terry Davis to interpret Wilde's masterpiece, and it is clear that this will not be either a sugary gay kitsch or a moralizing Hollywood horror film - Bourne is too smart and sarcastic for such options. An explosive fusion of excellent English irony and well-hidden sentimentality - that’s what his works are, which we happened to see in Moscow (his “male” “Swan Lake” and “A Play Without Words” were brought by the Chekhov Festival; by the way, “Dorian Gray” is also promised next year). However, what will happen this time is still unknown, but tickets to the three-tier Royal Theater are selling out at tremendous speed.

But New adventures will be dancing in Edinburgh towards the end of the festival (premiere on August 22). And another ballet event (not so sensational, but important) - the visit of the Georgian ballet - will take place in the first week of the festival. The theater in Tbilisi has been headed by former Bolshoi Theater ballerina Nina Ananiashvili for several years now, and she builds the repertoire herself. The Georgians are bringing last season's premieres to Edinburgh - one-act plays specially staged for this theater by Alexei Ratmansky and Yuri Posokhov (author of the marvelously beautiful Cinderella at the Bolshoi). Tours of this theater in Russia, of course, are not expected in the near future...

The main opera event will be a visit to the Mariinsky Theater - St. Petersburg will show “King Roger” and “The Enchanted Wanderer” (the latter in a concert version). And the “drama” program brings together theaters from Sarajevo, Warsaw, Palestine and Melbourne.

The Poles in The Dybbuk, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, will again remember the Second World War and understand the problems of relations with Jews. A dybbuk is a character in Jewish mythology, the spirit of a deceased person entering the body of a living person; In Warlikowski's play, a woman who survived the war is torn between the revealed spirit of her dead lover and her living but unloved husband. At the same time, Warlikowski directly reports that this is not a private story - it is Poland in the twentieth century that decides what to do with its Jews, accept them as part of itself or expel them. The Palestinians (“Jidariyya”) present some variation on the theme of “All This Jazz” by Bob Fosse: the main character, a poet, in a moment of a heart attack, recalls the loves that happened and did not happen, poems written and unwritten. A theater from Sarajevo in the play “Class Enemy” talks about teenagers from a poor area who are not needed by anyone, including their teachers; Australians, on the other hand, indulge in sophisticated fantasies based on the themes of Edgar Allan Poe (Barry Kosky’s play “The Tell-Tale Heart” based on the story of the same name). This way, Edinburgh will listen to everyone, look at everyone and simply take different points of view into account, since there are no prizes given out at this festival. Getting into the main program is already a sufficient prize.

Anna GORDEEVA