Up the river_POSTSCRIPTUM

Going against the flow, and even from infancy, it is so difficult that at some point you want to buy yourself a new life. So did the protagonist of this performance, born 70 years old shaggy old man and living backwards - as an old man clever, with a hardened body, and at the same time as a child helpless in everything that concerns interaction with people.

A very difficult task for an artist is to show a consistent transformation of a person from deep old age to childhood in 27 minutes. Unlike the original source - the story of Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" - in the production of Radu Poklitaru, instead of 4 generations of Batton men, more action is given to women. The wife of the protagonist, the daughter (adult and small), the mistress (the duet with which is one of the most beautiful places of the performance) and the granddaughter are a whole female world, next to which the life challenge and loneliness of the central character appear even sharper.

That's really true, "blessed is he who was young from his youth": the Man in Black is watching the suffering hero - the one who is not in the Fitzgerald story. Someone in whose hands the hero's chance to replay all over again. This mystical figure in a long cloak, it seems, has neither human nor historical age (the rest of the industrial era is easily recognizable by the rest), enters the stage through the door, behind which a blinding light, and gives the story a completely different scale. The hero will kiss the Man in the black hand and sell his life to live it differently.

But he will not be able to change anything. Even the Man in Black does not have power over the hero's special lot - again an old man, then a mature and young man, and finally again a boy who sets off a cry in a column of dense stage smoke. This performance is a very unusual unfolding of the old vanitas genre, which allegorically represents the futility of vain claims of power over destiny.

The premiere was held on April 25-26, 2017