BERTRAND’S TOYS

Music: Alexander Kopeikin, Biota, Art Zoyd, Alfred 23 Harth, Coil

Premiere 1995, Moscow

Awards: FRINGE FIRST 2000 (innovation in theatre and outstanding new production) - Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Edinburgh, UK);

 TOTAL THEATRE PRIZE (design concept and exceptional physical skill) - Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Edinburgh, UK);

GRAND PRIX, MAIN CRITIC’s PRIZE, PRIZE OF YOUNG CRITIC’s, two special prizes at the "Theatres Crash" festival in Klodzko (Poland). Marcella Soltan was awarded a special prize as best actress.

If it is the dream, then you will never wake up. If it is reality, then where is the door leading out of this world?

The earth is large enough for you to destroy the danger after you have flown far away from  it, but everything changes when you meet Sergeant Bertrand. The universe shrinks so small that looking ahead you see but your own back. And as if to make up for this measureless shrinking of the outer world, the inner world from a cozy everynight dreamshow cinema turns into a immeasurable chaos. The world is falling irrepressibly into two parts over which you equally do not have power, for which you are a borderline unable to change anything, and only able to hinder it from establishing its unity. Is it true that you have not met Bertrand before? Who showed you dreams? Who pushed onto the surface of your conscience those thoughts, the very reminiscences of which arise fear and disgust? For your soul feeling emptiness below everything has always been the same...

...now I know that serial killers and murderers of children, cannibal and satanists do exist, and I would meet their eyes, I would take a receiver still warm by their warmth, and I could not recognize them. No texts stay behind this performance except perhaps the briefest:

"This world is not what it seems to be"