Видео – 2014

Without trust, every human relationship becomes impossible. Orgon’s family mistrusts Tartuffe, and increasingly so, the more the patriarch places his trust in him. Their suspicions are proven right. Tartuffe is a sanctimonious hypocrite who preys upon people’s gullibility for his own profit. Moli?re adversaries were the hypocritical clerics of his day who fought tooth and nail to prevent »Tartuffe« from being performed. Eventually, the king sanctioned the performance, in a similar way to the regal turn for the best he displays in the actual play. The gullible Orgon is saved, the family remains intact and the daughter can marry her lover. Moli?re presents the hypocrite and his victim to an audience who at no point are left in any doubt of the evil intentions being pursued and the extent of Orgon’s naivety which prevents him from figuring them out. Evil draws its power not from its concealment: on the contrary, it is very easily spotted. But Orgon, like all of us, is compelled more often than not to trust people and the world if he wants to live.

The present day. A couple, a man and a woman, in their late twenties. They live in a big city, are well educated and have interesting jobs. They buy their coffee fair-trade and, as a matter of principle, boycott big chain stores. They watch art-house films in the original version with subtitles and read books about current political topics. »We are decent people« they keep reassuring themselves.

A world famous psychiatric hospital in Hungary was forced to close down a few months ago. The building has since become dilapidated; the garden is overgrown with weeds and a handful of patients have been left to vegetate alone on the fourth floor. The patients with developed dementia are living in the empire of amnesia... We have to face the following questions: How could society ever profit from one mental patient living a few years longer? What is the point of helping those who suffer when it all leads to death anyway? And besides, suffering is what propels humanity. When we numb ourselves with modern medicine we forget about religion and philosophy for good, albeit humanity found shelter in them before. May we presume the contradiction that death is Man's only hope and main human right?

(Русский) В основе спектакля Жоэля Помра лежит его одноименная пьеса, написанная по мотивам реальных бесед с разными поколениями коммивояжеров. Режиссер озабочен тем, как принципы коммерции, которые можно легко обнаружить в жизни современного общества, разрушают его, и мастерски воплощает это на сцене.

As a species, we prefer to talk of the innocence of our childhoods than to remember our potential cruelty. The selfishness and easy brutality of this period we regard as infantile, as easily consigned to the past once we are older, once we have become "civilised". Some commentators have even attributed our lack of early memories as a defence against the memory of our own overwhelming feelings – feelings so negative that we shame to own them.

POST Theatre presents the premiere of a new performance by Dmitry Volkostrelov. It’s a first Russian stage production of one of the major John Cage’s texts, Lecture on Nothing. Outstanding American composer, philosopher, poet, artist and thinker — he was emblematic culture figure of the 20th-century, though in Russia he remains well-known and important person only for a small part of the professional musical community.