THE BATTLE OF STALINGRAD: A REQUIEM
Tour of the Municipal Theatre Studio - Georgia
Direction, scenography and puppet design: Rezo Gabriadze
Direction of the sound record: Rezo Gabriadze
A complete author
Rezo Gabriadze, a playwrite and an artist was
born in 1936 in Georgia. He graduated from the Philological Faculty
on the State University of Tbilisi. Besides being a playrwrite,
Gabriadze is also a film director with a total of 35 films produced
including Take it Easy, Mimino, Kindzaza, Ecentrics ... Gabriadze
founded the Provincial Studio Theatre and toured with it Paris,
Berlin, Madrid, the U.S. and participated at many festivals: in
Edinburgh and Avignon, then Moscow and Ashington (?) (verovatno
Washington?) Gabriadze founded and built the puppet theatre in
early sixties. Together with a famous theatre cafe it became one
of the landmarks in tourist guides of Tbilisi eversince. The theatre
was ruined during the civil war, but upon Gabriadze's arrival
from the exile, he builds it from scratch, expands and renovates
it. Since the play The Battle of Stalingrad: A Requiem was staged
in 1994, it toured the whole of Europe, becoming a hit on the
last year' s World Stage Festival in Toronto and in the Lincoln
Centre Festival in New York.
About the play
"God, so many people had died and they
still haven't finished counting them. But no one has counted us,
ants, although there was no one who walked on earth so silently
like us", says the Ant, one of the most striking characters
of the Rezo Gabriadze puppet theatre play The Battle of Stalingrad:
A Requiem. The play was staged in 1994 and was Gabriadze's first
project upon his return from France where he found refuge during
the civil war in Georgia (1992-94).
The battle of Stalingrad: the requiem covers
the five year period and territories from Stalingrad towards Kiev
and from Moscow to Berlin. The battle itself is just a context,
a frame within which the audience follows several fates parallelly,
including generals of the army, horses and ants whose lives are
affected and determined by war. There is a horse named Aljosha
who is searching for his beloved Natasha, a circus mare; then
a boy named Yesha whom we first meet as an ice-cream man and next
time we see him as a crazed returnee from the battlefield who
is carrying a kalishnikov and interrupts into a wedding with it;
there is also an elegant painter and a spy, Molder, who smokes
in a decadent Berlin cafe at one moment and the next, falls in
front of it hit by bullets fired by an unknown attacker... Among
characters there is also a soldier from Odessa, the Soviet general
Gorenko, the German field marshal who leads his soldiers to various
wars within two millenniums.
Gabriadze portrays his characters as tragic
and comic and absurd, regardless of the warring side they belong
to. Their stories are presented as mutually interwoven poetic
fragments, in the literary and visual form of a collage. The author
uses different kinds of puppets - marionettes, gignoles, shadow
puppets of various sizes and materials. On his small puppet stage
- box, he is able to produce spectacular effects using very simple
means.
Silvija Jestrovic
