Lungs

Duncan Macmillan’s play is well-known to the European theatre community thanks to Katie Mitchell’s production at the Schaubühne in Berlin. Forty-year-old Marat Gatsalov is one of the headliners of contemporary Russian theatre and until recently was Artistic Director of the Alexandrinsky Theatre’s New Stage in St Petersburg. He has produced plays from «New Drama», worked with contemporary artists, composers and performers, but also with traditional theatre, as he possesses a talent for creating a psychologically precise picture of life on stage and for capturing the pulse of contemporary man. «Lungs» was co-authored with composer Sergei Nevsky, conceptual artist Ksenia Peretrukhina and choreographer Tatyana Gordeeva; it is a successful attempt to place our contemporaries – a young couple experiencing a global crisis in their relationship between each other and to the world at large – into a space seen not so much as theatre, but rather as an art object moving through time. Sounds, movements of objects, video mapping, sterile uniform clothing neatly hung in the wardrobe, the meditative tone used between the man and the woman – everything in «Lungs» works like a complicated impersonal mechanism, accentuating all the doubts about the future so acutely felt by the characters.