Skip to main content
На сайті проводяться технічні роботи. Вибачте за незручності.

Georgian “Firebugs” in Kyiv!

Tbilisi company of actors to perform at the Franko Theater
19 October, 00:00
A SCENE FROM THE PERFORMANCE BIEDERMANN AND THE FIREBUGS / Photo provided by the Del Arte PR Company

This time the famous Georgian director Robert Sturua will present a new production. The current tour of the Tbilisi-based troop will take place with the support of the production company ArtHouse, Vasyl Danyliv’s charity foundation “SVITLOMRII,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and the Embassy of Georgia to Ukraine. On October 27 and 28 Kyivites will be able to see a tragicomedy with elements of a show, called Biedermann and the Firebugs on the stage of the Franko Theater. The play is based on the dark comedy Biedermann and the Firebugs by the Swiss playwright Max Frisch, which was written during the World War II. The author defined its genre as “a morality play without a moral.” Frisch tries to understand how fascism could appear in such a country of high cultural traditions as Germany? The play was successfully staged in many leading theaters around the world.

The characters of the Georgian show (which adheres to the traditions of the Rustaveli Theater) appear on stage like Broadway stars. Thus, Gottlieb Biedermann shows up as a clown (the ironic, plastique and unique Zaza Papuashvili). Biedermann’s wife Babette, who looks like a diva, is a gorgeous and delicate lady (the beautiful Nino Kasradze will play this role). Schmitz, one of the firebugs (Beso Zanguri, who played the role of the president in an infamous play The Soldier, Love, Guard and the President by Sturua) will be a circus artist and his friend, who was released from the prison, named Mario Eisenring (David Darchia), became an exotic Muslim. Even the servant Anna, an unattractive girl (Sturua’s favorite Juliet, actress Ia Sukhitashvili) who understands that she is not successful with men, appears to be very bright and natural — she courageously saddles a bicycle to have a ride on the stage. The whole extravagant company (set design by Giorgi Aleksi-Meskhishvili), together with the firefighters’ choir, sing and recite. Legendary composer Giya Kancheli wrote the music for the play.

Robert Sturua’s performance, unlike Max Frisch’s play, ends with a fire — a metaphor for the world’s death, and the end of human civilization in general.

The director, using a clownish style, grotesque and mocking, does not raise current burning issues, neither social nor individual. (Who are we, why are we here, and now?) While Frisch’s play is usually accepted as a satire of a timid philistine, who easily makes concessions, Sturua shows how harmless conformism turns an obedient “cog in the machine” into an “acting cog.” If the playwright’s main character gives the firebugs a match, the director’s hero will become a firebug himself.

Delimiter 468x90 ad place

Subscribe to the latest news:

Газета "День"
read