In Evgeniia Safonova’s production Pushkin’s text, as a result of a certain chemical reaction, is organically amalgamated with contemporary notions of the game per se – not a card game or a theatre performance with a beginning and an end, – but the game as a total philosophical paradigm of the 21st century.

This world is indeed surrealistic. The card game goes through travesty, becoming a virtual game. The references to computer graphics and films of David Lynch, the movement patterns, so significant for this production (movement director – Sergei Larionov), the impressive voice leading, always substantial in Safonova’s works, – all of those help us to see the characters in their disrupted existence, on the sharp edge of the morbidly puppet-like and the distressingly alive.

In the coda of The Queen of Spades it seems that the curse of disruption is being lifted from the characters to reveal a different horizon of history, its human dimension.

In fact, in the course of action the actors repeatedly leave their characters and come forward to the footlights with some sort of ironic paraphrases of Brechtian “songs”, forming the second layer of the production. It looks like the epic component is a characteristic feature of Evgeniia Safonova’s theatre, and the musical structure of the production (composer – Oleg Gudachyov) is also connected with this feature of the director’s style. The characters lead their themes, and the ostinato of Pushkin’s lines – musically intoned, rhythmicized, – is also legitimate in the framework of the oratorical genre. For obvious reasons the characters do not maintain psychologically developed relations; Pushkin does not provide pretexts for such relations either. However, let’s look at the duet of Lizaveta Ivanovna and the Countess: the amazing (also in the musical sense) agon of Lidiia Shevchenko and Alexander Novikov, merciless and tragic, with that very sniper’s precision of aphoristically succinct, cast phrases. The artistic athleticism characterizes Safonova’s production as a whole, as well as every actor’s performance without exception.

Nadezhda Tarshis, Colta

When you have a close look at Liza’s weird performative dance in the best traditions of Suspiria, you may recognize embroidering – however, if in the book Liza was embroidering by the window, in the production Liza embroiders herself alive into the curving reality, pulling out either a thread or a spider web (the spider motif repeatedly appears in the set design). In the same way Hermann will no longer be able to leave the up staircase, every time clumsily falling from the stairs with his face down.

In this production the fashionable concept of “reading the classics with the eyes of a modern man” is felt unexpectedly keenly because the authors of the production went far beyond modernizing the place and time of action or translating the text of the play into the vernacular. They seem to have made a cut of the noosphere of 2019 with all its cacophony of glamorous images, social conflicts, and triumph of egocentrism – and, applying this to a 19th century work of literature, presented it to the audience. The result is vivid, bold, endlessly alarming – and, despite the ad verbum delivery of the text, the subject matter is completely different. Here Pushkin’s story hides something much more frightening, being born in the souls and expanding in the accelerating world – with its global web, omnipresent media, information war, background noise, clip thinking, the flurry of visual images, the endlessly growing cyberspace and constant rethinking of values. The time has come for new scary fairy tales.

Natalia Sokolova