Brothers, a theatre experiment of director Evgenia Safonova and leading young
actors of St. Petersburg, which has emerged thanks to collaborative reflections over the text of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. The young theatre team has rejected the detective story, which formed the basis of the writer’s final novel.
Fragments of text are being put together in a theatre collage, and the entire range of the novel’s plotlines and characters is carried beyond the boundaries of the story.

Having excluded the possibility of the immediate “recognition” of this textbook work of literature, the young production team offers the audience different conditions for its reception. The figure of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, father of four sons, has been turned into the abstract idea of “permissiveness”, whereas his credo and life philosophy form the general atmosphere and space, in which the performers interact.

There is not even a hint of postmodernist irony in the relationship with the classical text – and that’s the first and the most important thing that is appealing about Brothers.

The interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov is remarkable, first and foremost, not
because of the semantic, conceptual interpretation of Dostoevsky’s ideas, but namely because of the sounding, texture, rhythm, and the common intonation system. They are the flesh of the flesh of our times: in the production of Evgenia Safonova the original text of The Brothers Karamazov sounds poignant and fresh as if it had been written by a New Drama playwright.

Dmitry Renansky, Colta

This theatre experiment is a sort of opportunity to look very deep into a man, seeing his blind, shapeless, and face-less depths. This is indeed the darkest production in the director's biography. The flashes of light, the broken rhythm, the bodies, writhing as if in epileptic seizures, the unintelligible sounds and murmuring were the symptoms of diabolicalness, devouring the characters; they were the signs of the world, falling apart from light.

Tatyana Dzhurova, Theatre

Those were strong, very strong impressions. I haven’t seen and experienced anything like that in theatre for a very long time – or, perhaps, ever. It was very complicated – both emotionally and intellectually. It is a very interesting project.

Alyona Starostina, actress of POST theatre

In the structure of the performance, together with the gradual departure from the coherent narrative, de-individualization of the characters occurred. The emergence of the devil was preceded by some sort of a theatrical act of exorcism, when the characters seemed to be convulsing on stage in a collective epileptic seizure.
It was not the artist who was “molding the character”, but it was Dostoevsky’s personality itself that was highlighting, revealing in the character something visceral, locked by Safonova into the framework of rigid, almost concert-like form.

Tatyana Dzhurova, Theatre №47

This production doesn’t fit into the format we are used to. It is worth seeing only if you aren’t afraid of immersing yourself for four hours in a certain cold gloom, where you are accompanied by the sense of danger and uncertainty.

Review by an audience member