A piece loosely based on Alexander Dovzhenko’s legendary film “Earth” (1930), one of the undisputed peaks of Soviet silent cinema.

The Alexandrinsky Theatre described the production as an important step for its New Stage in probing the limits of stage language and searching for a new theatrical vocabulary. Who owns the land? We fight over it and imagine we can possess it, but in truth the land makes us, and takes us back when we die. It manages perfectly well without us; the illusion of ownership is dangerous. In Dovzhenko’s film, a ploughed field becomes a fault line in the world—nothing will be the same again. Didenko’s production is about the nineteen-nineties, about a catastrophe of generations, about the way historical memory is erased.

Writing in the St. Petersburg Theatre Journal (No. 4, 2016), Tatiana Dzhurova noted that Didenko doesn’t make us see, behind the performers’ backs, the ghosts of two quarrelling Slavic states or of our own internal strife. The piece is saturated with timeless, archetypal images of hatred, violence, and death, and suggests, if anything, that no symbolism can convey the real meaning of what is happening, divide the world into “us” and “them,” or decide who is truly responsible.

“I can’t control other people’s perception. I like it when the audience is free to interpret what it sees.” —Maxim Didenko