Mourning Becomes Electra, O'Neill
Пятый Театр, Omsk, Russia
"I'm not asking God or anybody for forgiveness. I forgive myself! I hope there is a hell for the good somewhere."
„Here curse collides with curse / The one who was beating, will be beaten / And who murdered, will be killed / But who will tear the seamen of the curse out of this house?“ - in Aeschylus' Oresteia guilt and vengeance grow like a deadly tumor throughout the generations of the Tantalid dynasty. Seeking revenge for her daughter, who was sacrificed to the gods, Clytemnestra is killing her husband Agamemnon after his return from the Trojan war. The cousin of Agamemnon, Aegisthus, takes her side, since he strives to get revenge for his father. But soon the vengeance recurs the vindicators themselves – Clytemnestra is murdered by her own children. Orestes and Electra kill their mother and her lover in revenge for the murder of their father - Agamemnon. But still the vicious circle is not broken – haunted by the ghosts of guilt Orestes in delusion is rushing through the world.
Eugene O'Neill transferred the action of Aeschylus's cycle of tragedies into the 19th century. His trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra takes place after the end of the American civil war. Here also the slaughtering of the battlefields finds its bloody prolongation inside of the family. O'Neill's characters are prisoners of the past. The dead do not let the living go. They vigorously request for revenge for the inflictions they have suffered. Sorrow leads to new sorrow and the thirst for vengeance expands throughout the generations until O'Neill's leading heroine Lavinia chokes it inside herself, taking it with herself into the grave, burying herself alive.
Mourning Becomes Electra shows the world at its cruelest – so terrible that all characters carry the dream in them to finally leave it for ever. And still no one achieves to escape. On the contrary they torture each other to death – to at least make sure, that no one else gets what they can not have themselves, legitimizing their actions under the cover of duty – their duty towards the dead, towards an abhorrent world, which they continually keep up and justify, instead of changing it.
starring: Vladimir Ostapov, Mariia Dolganeva, Anastasiya Sheveleva, Roman Dryablov, Sergey Shokolov, Dmitrij Makarov, Elena Zaigraeva, Ekaterina Bardysh
director: Andreas Merz Raykov
stage and costume design: Nadezhda Osipova
translation: Ekaterina Raykova-Merz