«The Robbers» Game»

Above all, the main aim of the artistic director Vyacheslav Dolgachev was the attempt to speak with the young audience using the young actors. And it is not so important that Schiller’s characters lived more than two hundred years ago, and in Germany by that. Their geographical and historical attributes are very relative on the stage of the New Drama, their distinctive features are blurred..

Dolgachev doesn’t retell the whole Schiller’s story, he extracts the most meaningful and decisive moments, trying to take a close-up of them. This perspective is supported with good lighting, plastique and solo intonations of the actors.

However the director didn’t forget about the outward performance, diluting the action with melodramatic episodes, vocal interludes or explicit «horrors» with villainous murders and streaming blood. May be in certain episodes the attempt «to keep abreast of the times» was too nagging and exaggerated. In this conditional concept of the play the words like «hood» or «check it out» seem too superfluous and redundant, the meaning of the action being clear without them. But all this is going to settle down in due time, when the actors and the director feel that the audience join the action and they shouldn’t be urged. The level of the mutual confidence may only be estimated in practice, and the practice here was successful.