(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

I reproduce here the email I sent theophile from Domodedovo airport, describing (?) the wonderful play I had just seen on my last night in Moscow, called "River":



The trip has been a trip...I saw a wonderful play last night that involved:

two policemen, one of whom accidentally almost kills the other one while drunk
then the almost killed policeman is rescued by a kind-hearted man on a float on a river
and the other policeman dons a fake beard and runs away to the woods
and this is all witnessed by a harmonica player
in fact they all play the harmonica, all four of them at once, while the harmonica player is supposed to be on a romantic date with his blonde girlfriend, and she cries because it is all so Russian-ungay
but also the wounded policeman starts understanding the language of nature
and there is another sub plot about a woman who cheats on her boyfriend, a poet, and he throws his cell phone into a river to not talk to her, and the kind man on the float finds it and he and the woman talk on the phone a lot, he consoles her
meanwhile the poet's hat flies away, because it wants to be free, and the Northern wind is in love with it; it befriends three moths and they fly around together and have adventures, carried by the lovesick Northern wind
finally there is a Detective, who was taking evidence about the almost-murder of the policeman
and he has a cat, who turns out to be a talking cat, and who leaves him, because he doesn't tell it he loves it enough and is either asleep or drunk at home...it is all very gender-metaphor
and at the end, as if in Aristotle's grand unifying play space, they all come together, and it ends with the hat and the Northern wind waltzing together

isn't that lovely?

on the interwebs I found some stills from the play:

these are the moths and the hat ("the freest hat in the world"):


this is the romantic date about to be derailed by the harmonica quartet


and this is the cat leaving the Detective (although on the night I saw it the actor was a different one)


more more more about Moscow to come, some under the lock, some in a public post.

Comments

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

aw the Russian theatre... so good.

[msmsgirl.livejournal.com]

It reminds me of The Master and Margarita! Is there a lot of modern Russian literature that has policemen in parks and around rivers and streams, and significant musicians, and mystical sentient animals, and things flying impossibly long distance on the wind, and long surreal sequences, and animated natural forces, and impossibly moving, vaguely symbolic plots of love and sadness that all come together in a surprising redemptive way that brings together the representational and the fantastical elements??

[yanatonage.livejournal.com]

That does sound amazing.