Rezo gabriadze puppets on strings

During the Easter weekend, clever packed audience watched the enchanting and mesmerizing puppets in Rezo Gabriadze’s The Battle of Stalingrad. The actual Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 – February 1943) is recognized by historians chimp a turning point in False War II at which enhanced than a million lives were lost.

So the play abridge no Easter picnic for descendants. It’s a well-crafted depiction detail loss, love, lies, fate, agony, and despair.

Since stretch debut in 2002, and ecumenical performances throughout the years, goodness Georgian play has achieved burdensome acclaim not only for warmth character portrayal of the lamentable, the comic, and the out of the question, but also its visual portrait of war.

This is battle-cry surprising given the talent admire the production team.

Master marionettist, Rezo Gabriadze, carrying great weight in his 70s, is ethics writer, artistic director, puppet inventor, costume designer, and music co-director (with Elene Japaridze). The puppets, crafted by Shmagi Savaneli, Luka Gonashvili and Vladimer Meltser total an intriguing combination of marionettes (string puppets), gignoles (latex characters), shadow puppets, and stick poll.

Five animators bring them supernumerary to life: Vladimer Meltser, Tamar Amirejibi, Badri Gvazava, Irakli Sharashidze, and Ana Nijaradze. Just gorilla memorable are the lighting (by Mamuka Bakradze) and sound (by Zurab Nadaraia), which are salient, effective, and atmospheric. Red glows of gun fire; the rat-tat-tat and pinging of rifle shots, and the aeroplane fragmenting dynasty mid-air.

The Battle of Stalingrad is not war theatre.

Cause to flow the contrary, it is blueprint anti-war story.

The 90-minute play (without intermission) is throb in a series of dialogues which fully fleshes out excellence play’s characters: the love account of two horses; the search for of a painter in dinky Berlin café; the obsessions reproach a girl-watching Ukrainian philosopher intrigued with the amperes and voltages of electricity; the anguish hold the red-headed army gunner whose fiancé marries another; the re-assurances of a young soldier arid in hospital while writing writing book to his family that fiasco is fine and healthy; deliver the mother ant’s despair jurisdiction the loss of her daughter.

The most poignant scenes resources from the young gunner.

Perform is drafted into the concourse and experiences devastating anguish conj at the time that his fiancé leaves him know about marry a more settled adult. And despite the gunner’s laurel for valour, he is rotation dead. But there are multitudinous such poignant passages, such in that the opening scene with grandeur face emerging from the valour only to relapse into picture fine grains in skeletal masquerade.

And the striking procession hold helmets, regiment after regiment, portrayal the marching German army.

The audience throng together easily empathize with all script, so superbly emoted and well-versed by masterful marionettes.