The performance is made after "Fear eats the soul" - a film of
the German director Reiner Werner Fassbinder telling a love story
of an elderly cleaning woman and a young Maroccan migrant. The
"Fear" maintains all the themes of the movie as well as its plot
- but, transferring from the post-Nazi Germany to contemporary
Russia, the story becomes even more provoking.
The actress of Gogol Theatre Svetlana Bragarnik, who plays a
pensioner Lyda, is the heart of this performance which has put
into the movement the whole its blood circulatory system. It’s
the same “golden heart” about which Lars von Trier speaks in “The
Idiots”. The same soul ready to resist fear and hatred. Bragarnik
plays not only the love for a man – she plays just the common
sense, struggling the madness of the society. Indeed, if you
love, it’s so naturally; if you hate and fear, it’s, in fact, so
plastically
Gleb Sitkovsky, Colta.ru
The performance is made after Fear eats the soul - a film by
German director Reiner Werner Fassbinder telling a love story of
an elderly cleaning woman and a young Moroccan migrant. Their
feelings become a strong challenge for the society unable to
accept it. Both characters are expelled from their usual
environment, mocked and obstructed by everyone.
Fear maintains all the themes of the movie as well as its plot -
but, transferring from the post-Nazi Germany to contemporary
Russia, the story becomes even more provoking. The show about
love between an old Moscovite Lida and a guest worker from
Tajikistan Abu is a really strong social gesture, but it is still
romantic, not to tell ‘sentimental’. The problem of nationalism
becomes just a kind of a background for a tender story of love
stronger than any social, age or racial barriers.
The only sceneries are white plastic chairs and tables, easily
turning the stage into any place from a Tajik cafe to a Moscow
flat. Moscow here is a plastic city, which can be rapidly
destroyed by a clumsy movement. The fear of the ‘guests from the
South’ becomes for the heroes just a way of escaping from their
own problems and complexes.