“St. Petersburg Theatre Seasons” Festival provides its audience not only with an enjoyable experience of watching online the best of Saint Petersburg’s performances. After watching the broadcast, the viewers have an opportunity to meet the creators of the performances and ask them about their work. Hence, the magic of the theatre still continues after the final curtain call is done, and the audience is not confined only to watching performances. Everyone can ask artists or the director a question and receive an honest answer.

2 h. 40 min. with one intermission. Age restriction 18+

“King Lear” is the first production of Shakespeare in the “Nebolshoi Drama Theatre”. The rehearsals of the play were going for almost five years; the premiere took place in a landmark year for the theatre — the year of its 20th anniversary. “King Lear” is staged in the acute genre of slapstick mixed with drama, grotesque, sometimes turning into a theatre of horror. Medieval cruelty suggests associations with the arrogance and cruelty of many modern people deaf to the voice of reason and ready to do anything for asserting their own rightness and gaining more benefit.

Lev Erenburg, “This story tells us how the purest and best motives can lead to the most destructive and absurd consequences if these motives are associated with fanaticism, unwillingness to compromise, and cruelty.”