“The Gran” Drama Theatre from Novokuybyshevsk returns to the Diaghilev Festival. “Gran” rose to nationwide fame in the 2010s when director Denis Bokuradze took the helm. His bold interpretations of classical works regularly made it into the long and short lists of the Golden Mask — Russia’s top theatre award — and earned multiple nominations and wins. Despite gaining official state status, the theatre has preserved its experimental spirit and studio energy.

This time, the troupe presents a revival of King Lear, which received four Golden Mask nominations in 2018 and won one. In his production, Denis Bokuradze closely follows Shakespeare’s plot but puts a strong focus on human relationships under the pressure of absolute power and control: “A state, the power to shape others’ fates, absolute belief in the rightness of one’s choices — even reckless ones — all of this was once in Lear’s hands. But it slips through his royal fingers, and the man who once ruled the world can no longer manage a simple meal. Lear embarks on a painful journey, accompanied by the Fool — the king’s second self, the one who tries to protect Lear from himself. But once Lear descends into madness, the Fool vanishes, because the king himself becomes the fool. Having lost everything — his mind, his home, his loyal followers, even his daughters — Lear begins to live a life he had never truly known. He begins to feel what it means to be human.”

The moral law within me
The starry sky above me.

Man, nature, and the echo of evil — these are main subjects in the new performance of Sophia Hill, the permanent co-author of the Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos and the leading actress of the Attis Theatre in Delphi.

Macbeth wanders through foreign land — an inner exile where memory and morality give way to fear and thirst for power.
Man forever stands at the threshold: between the nature that gave him life and the nature that he threatens to destroy; between his inner morality and his thirst for dominance. His detachment from the moral and cosmic rhythm of nature is an act of hubris that inevitably leads to downfall.

In Macbeth, destructive rage reveals an inner fracture. Evil is not a law of nature but the result of a consciousness that refuses to accept the measure and frailty of mortal existence. The insatiable hunger for power, control, domination, knowledge, and immortality leads to alienation from the natural body — the body bound by time and memory. Will man merge with the machine? Will the post-human emerge — rootless, timeless, memoryless, bodiless — stripped of all tragedy?
Who will survive this struggle?
Nature is true time — eternal and indestructible.
Man is nothing but a fleeting deviation.