Russia is not a good place to live, as the film’s cold staging suggests. Magician of the Kremlin by Roland Auzet. Freely adapted from the novel by Giuliano da Empoli (Gallimard), whose premiere in April 2022 was recognised with the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, this show opens the season at La Scala in Paris on a note of frank gravity.
Almost two hours of a performance that aims to take seriously the deleterious political state of contemporary Russia. The analysis of the Putin regime, of its fascist dimension, of its epigones spread throughout the world: the project does not encourage frivolity, while numerous autocrats lurk on both sides of Europe. We smile even less as the staging uses and abuses video and sound devices to amplify the dramatic scope of the subject.
The show is part of an impressive system of cold videos, blinding lights and aggressive strobe projections. A set whose visual impact authoritatively takes the audience hostage. The image is not discreet, even if the words spoken by the actors are difficult to understand. But there are many words flowing in French, even belched in Russian (not always translated), on the stage of La Scala. Torrents of sentences that fail to free themselves from their literary matrix.
Unfathomable enigma
Giuliano da Empoli’s style, which shines in writing, weighs heavily on the actors’ oral expressions. However, equipped with high-frequency microphones and directed at the stage as if they were playing an episode of a television series, they must face a tortuous logorrhea and run after the end points in search of oxygen. For some, this journey is like a hellish marathon. Which does not help to understand the scope of the theoretical discourses expressed about Russia yesterday and today.
But it would be unfair to blame the interpreters alone for the difficulties in dealing with the text. The problem is greater. Are we, in fact, capable of understanding in two hours the profound nature of a country whose past or present history is alien to us? Tsarism, Communism, the USSR, Perestroika and finally Vladimir Putin: whether they evolve into democracy or suffer a dictatorship, the Russian people resist, but, whether they bow or stand, they cannot be easily deciphered.
In her book, Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievitch offers an edifying portrait of post-Soviet Russia. 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 poses and that the show transmits, at the risk of being devoured by it.
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