THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

You should be ready to discover that nothing is left of Thomas Mann here. Except perhaps the constant tuberculous cough and the certainty that death, rust-like, covers the walls of the iron bunker with only two characters inside: a woman and a man, actress Elena Morozova and Konstantin Bogomolov himself. She will cough and recite poetry, he will read quietly, rhythmically turning over the pages.

The audience has about 40 minutes to cough to their heart’s content – apparently that’s the reason why people end up in a theatre anyway. Well-known provocateur Bogomolov is egregiously gentle this time: unhealthy audience unnoticeably becomes the main element of his narrative. He creates a masterful short macabre atmosphere where everyone is equal in their bronchitis and headlong movement towards the bottom of the mountain – the very same mountain from whose top dead bodies are sledged down in Thomas Mann’s story.
The cough is sometimes interrupted by the poetry of Zabolotsky, Shalamov and Nekrasov, and in the second part it is replaced altogether by ironic gags about the death of authorship by Bogomolov himself.

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