Masquerade

The premiere held on 2010. 01. 21

The poetic drama by Mikhail Lermontov uncovers the ruthless truth about people and the world they live in, the severe world where the morality teeters on the razor’s edge.

But masquerade is also the feast with enchanting music, bright costumes, mysterious masks, alluring power of revelry, where people make fun, slander and gammon, without being recognized, as they are free from everything including their own selves.

Masquerade is a theatre of characters, intrigues, flirting, intense and dangerous confessions. Fools and scoffers, dissemblers and clowns, romantic heroes and hoaxers run together hiding sense of shame under the masks.

Masquerade is a game with the partner and with his destiny. Here you get killed with words and gossips. And when the mask is off you shed slops of compassionate tears.

What a capturing and guileful world is a masquerade. A thoughtless intrigue gathers like a snowball and rolls down to the victim and the temper.

Masquerade is a restless run inside the circle where you get seized by the swift whirlwind, bravura revelry takes your mind away.

Masquerade is a dream. You discover the meaning of it with the last chord of the Waltz. Those who were lucky to see Tuminas’s “Masquerade” in the Vilnius Small Theatre should not compare it with The Vakhtangov Theatre performance. That will make no sense as the performance is not a copy but an author’s replication. Director’s ideas broke in through the individuality of Vakhtangov’s actors, as each of them has his own distinctive voice.

Rimas Tuminas’s“Masquerade” is a tragic farce, a sad Commedia dell’Arte, leaned into nowadays, spinning to the sound of the Waltz by Aram Khachaturyan that over the decades returned to The Vakhtangov stage for which it was written.