Translated material
Open house
An international theater festival has begun in St. Petersburg
For sixteen years in a row, in the fall, at the beginning of the season, “theaters of the Baltic region countries” come to the northern capital. Established in 1990 for the sake of preserving cultural ties with the former republics, then already neighboring countries, the Baltic House festival gradually attracted distant foreign countries into its orbit - Poland, Germany, Scandinavia. The Baltic House has become perhaps the main St. Petersburg festival event, forming its own special space for communication and cultural exchange, for meeting sometimes polar theatrical ideas and meeting new names. And this space has actually become a home where they solemnly present the official award of the Ministry of Culture for their contribution to the development of humanitarian ties - the “Baltic Star”, and unofficially reward regular participants and friends with the no less honorable title of “brownie”.One of these regular guests, the Vilnius theater Meno Fortas, opened the current festival. Eimuntas Nekrošius, whose name has a magical effect on the Russian audience, showed on the stage of the Baltic House Theater the premiere of Goethe’s Faust with Vladas Bagdonas in the title role and with the subtitle: “sketch of the play.” Muscovites will be able to evaluate how complete this sketch is in November, when Faust arrives in the capital. Here, over the next ten days, productions will be presented, some of which, such as “A Long Life” by Alvis Hermanis and “Three Sisters” by Rimas Tuminas, Moscow has already seen, others are unlikely to be seen soon. Thus, for the second year in a row, Moscow critics, who seem to have no shortage of new European theater, regularly travel to St. Petersburg for the performances of the Belgian director Luc Percival. At the last festival, Percival showed “Othello,” a radically modernized and psychologically perfect version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, staged by him at the Munich Theater, and this time he brings Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” with Belgian actors. But still, the main theme of the festival, according to its organizers Sergei Shub and Marina Belyaeva, this year should be the “Polish accent”. The special Polish program includes two productions from Warsaw: “Cosmos” by Witold Gombrowicz (National Theatre, directed by Jerzy Jarocki) and “Zapasiewicz plays Beckett” (Theater Powszechny, directed by Antoni Libera), as well as a photo exhibition dedicated to the stage interpretation of Gombrowicz’s plays, and several lectures on contemporary Polish theater.
Of course, in addition to the foreign program, the festival also has its own pride, that is, the Russian part, for which they are responsible: from St. Petersburg - Andrey Moguchy with the play “Not Hamlet” and the Bolshoi Drama Theater with “Mary Stuart” staged by Temur Chkheidze, from Moscow - “Phaedra . The Golden Ear" by Andriy Zholdak and the Moscow Art Theater "Forest" by Kirill Serebrennikov. Thus, at the theatrical forum that the “Baltic House” gathers, there will be both classical and commercial art that does not meet any standards, that is, precisely the art that, with all its advantages and disadvantages, is modern. This means that the festival is alive; and I want to believe that in a year and beyond it will be like this.