OOOO - The dream of Gogol - Theatre Laboratory Sfumato

“OOOO-The Dream of Gogol” After “Nevsky Prospect“,“Ivan Fiodorovich Shponka and his Aunt“, “Marriage“ and “Diary of a Madman“ by Gogol Adapted and directed by Margarita Mladenova and Ivan Dobchev. Set and costumes Daniela Oleg Liahova original music Assen Avramov Actors: Snezhina Petrova, Albena Georgieva, Miroslava Gogovska, Elena Dimitrova, Hristo Petkov, Tzvetan Alexiev, Ognyan Golev, Antonio Dimitrievsky. This is not simply a performance on Gogol’s texts; this is a subsequent expedition of Sfumato in an author’s world. On the horizon of our quest we can foresee the phantasmagoric silhouette of Gogol, wrapped around his famous overcoat, timidly tiptoeing at the mighty Nevsky Prospect – a gigantic display of the Empire where St. Petersburg marches by daily. That ghost-city, that nutty project inspired by the image of the heavenly Jerusalem is recognized by Gogol as a haunt of demons and devils. Gogol’s humans live amongst them – every single one of them is a duplicate of himself, a nature of his fears, yearnings and disappointments. And they, just like their creator, stand before the riddle of the Genesis – as David in front of Goliath, as Oedipus in front of the Sphinx, as the snail against the mountain. They rave their lives on the edge between two abysses – the cosmos and the microcosm, the visible and the invisible, the dream and the wakefulness, the enchantment and the desperation. Behind the touching seriousness of the insistence on achieving their predestination, on fulfilling their duty to the phenomenon of life, peeks an uterine fear – fear from the traps of that very same life. Marriage as one of the most ancient traps of life, against which the human ant guards its intimate space in panic. In the carousel, eccentric movement of the “divine mechanic” the trace of the singly human act produces the effect of the firefly in June: light on, light off. Yet the billion flashes write out in the dark a sentence of providence; a sentence that is inarticulate for us. The genius of Gogol releases our intuition for paradoxes, for phantasmagoric enlightenments, truer than straight logic. Like the speculation that success is a form of death, whereas the failure – a chance for resurrection. Otherwise how can we acknowledge the human as a being that is striving for happiness – and running away from it when finally finding it? Margarita Mladenova Ivan Dobchev premiere: 16 March 2009