GOGOL CENTRE
MOSCOW, RUSSIA

Duration 1 hour 30 minutes

Director Maxim Didenko

Premiere took place on 14 May 2016

CREATIVE TEAM

Composer Ivan Kushnir

Set designer Galya Solodovnikova

Video design Ilya Shagalov

Lighting design Ivan Vinogradov

Sound design Filipe Karetsos

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CAST

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Poet Mikhail Troynik 

Old man Vyacheslav Gilimov / Veniamin Smekhov

Spring Svetlana Mamresheva / Maria Poyezhaeva

Summer Maria Seleznyova

Autumn Alexandra Revenko 

Winter Svetlana Bragarnik

Chairman Filipp Avdeev

Hamlet Rinal Mukhametov / Nikita Kukushkin

Officer, ram Georgy Kudrenko 

Officer, hog Artyom Shevchenko 

Boy Nikita Schetinin

Boris Pasternak, the legendary twentieth-century poet, won the Nobel Prize in Literature—and with it world fame and disgrace at home. People of very different tastes and politics see him very differently, and that ambiguity interests Didenko as much as the poems: “This play is an experiment with consciousness and immersion into the other layers of perception and tempo/rhythm. The poetic theatre allows spectators to become part of the process.”

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Didenko makes visually and technically singular shows at the junction of performance art, physical theatre, and music theatre. In “Pasternak: My Sister—Life,” the older actors read the poems while the younger ones sing and “dance” them, giving the images a body.

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Galya Solodovnikova designed a transforming set that works with the actors’ bodies and makes room for near-circus acrobatics.

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The music is by Ivan Kushnir, Didenko’s longtime collaborator, for whom the project was a genuine challenge:  “There are no usual European forms and structures in it. This music is more like a ritual or a meditation. It is similar to a frozen picture. It is like a landscape. It is like grassland and sun, but in music.”

There are three Pasternaks onstage, at three different ages. Veniamin Smekhov, who plays one of them, had long wanted to work with Didenko: “Maxim’s work is a gargantuan deed expanding spectator’s intellectual perception. It is an intellectual circus. It is an intellectual carnival comprising sound, emotion and fantasy tied together, living together and breathing as one.”