YOUR GOGOL

The main subject of Valery Fokin as a director are borderline human conditions, the line between madness and revelation, reality and fantasy. In Fokin's performances, delirium of an inflamed mind becomes reality, and sometimes space itself undergoes amazing metamorphosis. Fokin created his unique theatrical language the in the process of staging the works by Nikolai Gogol. Gogol himself becomes a character in his most recent premiere. Together with the composer Alexander Bakshi and the young painter Maria Tregubova Fokin invites the audience to pay the writer's last tribute. Distraught Gogol is immersed in darkness. Visions from the past get mixed in his mind with the thoughts about the future of Russia and art, materializing the phantom of Gogol's intimate friend, the poet Alexander Pushkin. The performance is played under the roof of Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg: at the moment the genius enters another dimension, he slips out from the theatre into the real city.
For the last time we see him sliding between the legs of raised horses in the copper quadriga crowning the theatre's pediment. This is a great metaphor of Gogol's creative work, glorifying St. Petersburg, the city where the line between the living and the dead, the great and the low, reality and fiction is eaten by the Baltic fog to the extent of becoming indistinguishable.

Elena Kovalskaya

Life of a writer seen as an artistic act as well as an artistic text with its own plot and its own super objective, made it possible to see in a different light the art of the giants of literature, their personality, and more widely – the human life itself.
Valery Fokin has made up his mind not only to analyse and try to understand the reasons and circumstances of the Nicolai Gogol’s departure, but also to live the very moment when the soul is parting with the body, to arrange for them some kind of confrontation by means of the most physical of the arts – by the theatre. To recreate by the theatrical means the holy of holies – the moment when a soul, freeing itself from the chains of the body, reappraises the values, what has been achieved and done while alive. The time of a trial where everyone is both a judge and a defendant…

Noviye Izvestiya

On the one hand, the overthrow of a myth and sober skepticism instead of stereotyped mysticism, on the other –an obvious attempt to make a performance-rite, which works with the audience through the atmosphere rather than through the message: let us take, for instance, the rustling and ringing music by the composer Bakshi which holds the audience until the very end of the performance and clearly refer to the infernal “box-like performances” by Fokin.

OpenSpace.ru

This performance is generated by the logic of change which has shaped the theatre of Valery Fokin in recent years[…]A passionate researcher and an expert on the national stage direction legacy, Fokin has always been consistently attentive towards achievements of the modern Western theatre. So it is quite natural that the latest (if approached chronologically) work of the Artistic Director of the Alexandrinsky Theatre perfectly fits the context of the current European stage directing. With “Your Gogol” Valery Fokin presents a theatre model relatively new for him (and for the Russian drama on the whole), though well-known to the foreign theatres of today, - it could be conventionally called “creative”, (and, always conventionally, it could be opposed to the “interpretative” model) – in respect to the performance, in which the director is concerned with the creation of a theatrical text ab ovo rather than with the interpretation of some existing literary source.

The Empire of Drama

This is not a classical Gogol from the scholastic textbook. Fokin’s performance has a great witty scene: the make-up artists bring in two wigs and two moustaches on wooden blocks and in just a minute turn two actors into Gogol. Long hair, fringe, and a little moustache – it is like everyone can look like the great Russian writer with their help. But Fokin, on the contrary, is trying to break into other spheres where everything outward, earthly loses its sense. He stages a play about a dying Gogol, who mercilessly judges himself, imagining himself sometimes a prophet, sometimes a worthless nobody, and preparing – almost voluntarily – to part with his body forever.

Kommersant