“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.

Duration – 2 h. 20 min. without intermission. Age restriction 16+

“An optimistic tragedy. A Farewell Ball” is a research performance which deconstructs the mythology of the Soviet era and makes an attempt to cure its metastases. The legendary 1955 Alexandrinsky production directed by Tovstonogov, was academic, pompous, and majestic. It gained Vishnevsky’s play a status of a monument to the Soviet regime, turned it into an allegory of struggle between Good and Evil, with all the priorities set once and for all.

Yet the play that an ex-seaman Vsevolod Vishnevsky wrote in 1933 for Alexander Tairov (and in collaboration with the latter) grew to a very ambiguous and turbulent text. The author and the theatre company were seeking for a modern analogue of an antique choir, were experimenting with addressing to theatre audience and hazardous intermedia-discussions on contemporary art, and — most important of all — they grasped the depth of tragedy, stepped into the abyss of insolvable contradictions that only time can solve. Nowadays, the questions raised in the play sound familiar and resonant with the time.

They cause another wave of grandeur — not because the answers are near, but because there are no answers at all. And this feeling makes you want to scream, it can’t be silenced. The new edition of the play is a result of co-work, a blend of original Vishnevsky’s text and 20th century’s illustrative opuses — from Blok and Rozanov to yard songs and punk music. Directors and performers deliberately provoke each other to extract personal, sympathetic utterances. The myth collapses and reveals the bare undisguised conflict.