Russia is not a pleasant country to live in, as the icy staging of the film suggests. Do you like Kremlin by Roland Auzet. Freely adapted from the novel by Giuliano da Empoli (Gallimard), whose release in April 2022 was hailed by the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, this show opens the season at La Scala Paris on a note of frank gravity.
Read the story of a book (2022): Article reserved for our subscribers “The Mage of the Kremlin” by Giuliano da Empoli: the Kremlin is worth a novel
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Almost two hours of a performance that aims to be serious about the deleterious political state of contemporary Russia. The analysis of the Putin regime, its fascist dimension, its epigones scattered all over the world: the project does not encourage lightness, while many autocrats lie in wait on both sides of Europe. We smile all the less because the staging uses and abuses video and sound artifices to amplify the dramatic scope of the subject.
The show is part of an impressive system of cold videos, blinding lights and aggressive stroboscopic projections. A scenography whose visual force authoritatively takes the audience hostage. The image is not discreet, even though the words spoken by the actors elude understanding. And there are many words that flood in French, or even belch out in Russian (not always translated), on the stage of La Scala. Torrents of sentences that fail to free themselves from their literary matrix.
Unfathomable riddle
Giuliano da Empoli’s style, which is flamboyant in writing, weighs down the actors’ speech when spoken. Although equipped with wireless microphones and directed on stage as if they were playing an episode of a TV series, they have to brave tortuous logorrhea and run after the final points in search of oxygen. For some, this crossing is like a hellish marathon. Which does not help to grasp the scope of the theoretical discourses expressed on Russia yesterday and today.
But it would be unfair to blame the interpreters alone for the difficulties of approach posed by the text. The problem is broader. Are we, in fact, capable of grasping in two hours the profound nature of a country whose past or present history is foreign to us? Tsarism, communism, USSR, perestroika and finally Vladimir Putin: whether it evolves in a democracy or suffers dictatorship, the Russian people hold on, but, bent or standing, it does not allow itself to be easily deciphered.
Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich has provided an edifying portrait of post-Soviet Russia in her book The End of the Red Man (Actes Sud, 2013), its reality remains an unfathomable enigma. It is this enigma that Giulano da Empoli’s novel raises and that the show relays, at the risk of being swallowed up in it.
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