Bloody Mary

Gradually, their conversations begin to merge with the play itself, and the old story of power, jealousy, and execution unfolds here and now. When everything ends in death, life continues - and the cycle begins again.

Dmitry Krymov’s Bloody Mary is neither an adaptation nor an illustration of Schiller’s drama. It is an entirely new theatrical world, constructed from fragments of a bloody historical plot, from our conscious and unconscious memories of it, and from the realities of the present day, in which Mary Stuart becomes the starting point for a profound contemporary conversation.

Its fictional characters - grotesque, almost circus-like figures, people transformed into symbols gradually acquire flesh and blood before our eyes. Masks crack, clowning turns into confession, and theatrical personas become startlingly human. In this theater, comedy always stands beside tragedy, and play becomes both a way of existing and a means of telling the story of our complicated lives.

 Performed in Russian with English and Azerbaijani surtitles.