No Fear

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.