Reviews 2002
Reviews 2002
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Rezo Gabriadze
Rezo Gabriadze Theatre-Studio, du Maurier Theatre Centre, Toronto
May 1-4, 2002
"A Requiem for All the Dead"
The first World Stage Preview closes with a puppet play from the Republic of Georgia, “The Battle of Stalingrad: A Requiem”, written and directed by Rezo Gabriadze. Artists like Felix Mirbt and Ronnie Burkett have helped Canadians accept that puppets and marionettes can communicate complex emotions and themes that appeal to an adult audience. Gabriadze’s “Stalingrad”, written in 1996, presents through a riveting collage of images, realistic and fantastic, a moving portrait of life and death during war.
The historical Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942-February 1943) was a turning point in World War II. The Soviet victory at what is now Volgograd halted the advance of the German army and initiated a series of offensives that would take the Soviets into Germany. The battle claimed more lives than any single conflict in the war--over 800,00 German soldiers and 1.3 million Russians. Gabriadze’s “Stalingrad” is a requiem for all the dead--German, Russian, Georgian, Jewish, from insect to angel, beggar to general.
“Stalingrad” is performed in Russian with English surtitles to a prerecorded soundtrack of a wide range of music, vivid sound effects and eighteen voices from an Odessa-based troupe of actors. It cover a period from 1937 to 1943 and moves from Stalingrad to Kiev, Moscow and Berlin. Unifying the fourteen scenes of the play is the central image of a fine white sand that in different contexts can appear as snow, dust or ashes. In the very first scene a skeletal man slowly rises from a plot of this sand, finding a flag, a red star, a helmet and a cross in it, setting the helmet on the cross before he begins to bury himself. This first powerful image reflects not just of the effects of a particular battle but the transitory nature of life and of all bonds.
Several stories and characters weave through the various scenes. We follow the a horse Alyosha searching for his beloved Natasha, a circus horse. When they finally meet, absence has made her love wane. We meet the boy Yasha, first as an ice-cream vendor then as a gunner. He comes across a Jewish wedding where his beloved is marrying someone else, she says, because she couldn’t find Yasha. He takes out his anger in reckless gunning and is gunned down himself. In a café in Berlin we meet a dandified artist Molder, who perhaps because of contact with a spy, is killed in the street, his paintbrush and red hat falling to the ground just like a Russian soldier’s helmet and gun. We meet a Mother Ant looking for sugar for her daughter. The play closes with her lament that her daughter has died, that there is no safety above or below the earth. When she buries herself in a mound of sand the play has come full circle.
The subtitle “A Requiem” is important. Contrary to the present mindset that thinks of revenge as the only remedy for past injury, Gabriadze’s “Stalingrad” serves as a requiem in honouring the dead and in helping the living come to terms with loss. The inclusion of the horses and the ant places the human conflict in a larger context. Scene 12 when the German commander General Paulus speaks with Alyosha links the two as beasts of burden. The final scene links the dying soldier of the beginning with creatures deemed insignificant. We are told explicitly that as an atom is to the a pellet of shot, so is a man to the earth. And in Scene 2 the impoverished worker Pinchas says that electrons are divided into the Volts and the Amperes and that it is their conflict that causes electricity. While the play is a visual lament for the dead, it also situates life and conflict between Pascal’s two worlds, the infinitely small and the infinitely large, to help us see them from a cosmic perspective.
From this point of view Gabriadze’s version of tabletop bunraku seems the perfect medium. The faces of the five black-clad “animators” (Vladimer Maltser, Ketevan Kobulia, Gaiane Taqaishvili, Tamara Amiredjibi, Badri Gvazava) are always visible and some of the characters and props are extremely small. This contrast plus the manipulation already underscores the fact that life is at the mercy of larger forces. This is epitomized in two brilliant scenes. In one a soldier lies in bed held in place by six strings. As he discusses the breakup of water into oxygen and hydrogen, one by one an animator removes each string until he lies crumpled in bed. The scene showing the itself has no puppets at all. All we see is red light on the tabletop stage and while we hear the sound of guns and explosions suddenly the back of the tiny stage drops open to reveal the back wall behind it, momentarily exploding the theatrical illusion.
Art director Revaz Gabriadze has given all the images a distorted look as if in a dream. The scene in the Berlin café alludes to Georg Grosz, the relentless massing of troops to Leni Riefenstahl and the colourful Jewish wedding and ascendance of the various dead characters arcing into the sky to Marc Chagall. Within the confines of the small stage opening, lighting designer Boris Aleksandrov creates a host of cinematic effects.
The show is endlessly inventive using marionettes large enough to need two animators, to shadow puppets, puppets on a single stick and even decorated glove puppets. A train is a revolving green bucket with a light shining through windows, the passing scenery are a sequence of props placed on two revolving turntables. A snowstorm is a thin stream of sand blown on to moving sheets of helmets by a fan. A skeleton of an airplane shot down breaks apart, the sections gracefully gliding through space. The animate creatures are made lifelike with incredibly delicate and precise manipulation--the worker Pinchas reflecting on life, the agile dancer at the wedding, the artist Molder smoking at his table. Such attention to detail in the expression of emotion through gesture is what makes the death of the horse Natasha and the lament of the Mother Ant the most moving scenes in the play.
Gabriadze first built his 48-seat puppet theatre in 1981. After it was destroyed during the Georgian Civil War (1992-94), he rebuilt it to seat about 100. There’s no question that at 425 seats the du Maurier Theatre is too large a venue for a show that so often employs such miniscule props and subtle gestures. Nevertheless, Rezo Gabriadze is one of the greatest practitioners of this form of theatre and those intrigued by its possibilities should not miss the chance to see his work.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Scene from The Battle of Stalingrad. ©2002 Stephanie Berger.
2002-05-03
The Battle of Stalingrad: A Requiem