Photo by Olympia Orlova

The Magic Mountain

After the novel by Thomas Mann
Director: Konstantin Bogomolov
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Duration: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

The premiere took place in 2 October 2017.

Thomas Mann's novel, published in 1924, and a harbinger of the coming war, begins with the arrival of Hans Kastorp in an alpine sanatorium where his cousin resides. Castorp hears an Austrian cough horribly and is settled in the room where a young American woman just died. People say that in the winter the corpses are lowered down on bobsleds, and everyone insists that time here flows quite differently from down below.

This production by Konstantin Bogomolov (his first at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre) begins with a 50-minute performance by actress Yelena Morozova, who, coughing, gradually "infects" the whole house. The actress and director conduct ten poetic and cynical dialogues that are not connected by plot, although each in its own way speaks about death as an instrument of God.

This early segment establishes a fundamental domain of honesty for the performers who create this production of Magic Mountain as a territory that lies beyond compromise. We ascend with them to a high-altitude region where the sun does not so much give joy as provoke decay, although beautiful words shine like ice.

The text of the novel is never rendered literally, yet the show is not meant to be a deceitful trick played on the audience; it is indeed a show based on Mann’s novel. Bogomolov has reflected The Magic Mountain in the mirror of the stage by means of other texts, as well as sounds, music, visual imagery, the geometry of space. Bogomolov offers the audience the very essence of the novel, with its “water” constituent evaporated, as well as everything else that connected it to a specific time, place, actions, and characters. Bogomolov does not alter the text, nor does he betray it or fail to stay faithful to it. – The Theatre Times

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Videographers: Nadezhda Bushueva/Pavel Emelin
 

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