Two actors onstage: Maxim Didenko and Alisa Oleynik.

Before the start, the brown-paper runner the audience walked in on is noisily rolled up, and the auditorium door is locked. There’s no way out: for the next ninety minutes the only direction is forward, into a myth being made here and now, somewhere between film, dance, circus, and the spoken word. The means are minimal—a cubic room and a camera projecting silent film onto a brick wall.

Didenko’s Bluebeard is a man of our time. If, as Graham Greene had it, hell is a sense of eternal loss, Bluebeard lives in outright pandemonium. He keeps finding love and losing it, doomed to kill his wives until his own throat is cut. He meets his victims in a park, yet is terrified of the immensity of first love. Perhaps he is a perfectionist, and every episode of his life is one more romantic fiasco on the road to the ideal. Tellingly, all of Bluebeard’s victims, even the first and greatest, are played by one actress, Alisa Oleynik. The production is a duel between a man and a woman, and the experiments with silent film lend it, each time, a double or even triple meaning. (After Teatral magazine, No. 2, 2011)

Each of Heinrich’s encounters with a woman is a search for a way to connect. Alisa and Maxim, both deeply versed in physical theatre, build the piece out of difficult lifts, daring in their absurdity, and, by contrast, out of beautiful sculptural images. The play is Dea Loher’s “Bluebeard: Hope of Women.” Loher moved the myth of the wife-killer onto a postmodern playground: of Charles Perrault’s character, only the name and the tail of the myth remain. Heinrich Blaubart is like an empty flask that women fill with words of love; when the words become too many, they die. In a sense, it is a play about the crisis of the very idea of love in the modern world. (After A. Dunaeva, St. Petersburg Theatre Journal, 2011)