BRECHT CABARET. Director Yriy Butusov

Brecht is a genius with many faces, everything about him is important for me. But primarily I make an attempt to understand Brecht as a person. In my eyes he is firstly a man of Theatre with extraordinary temperament, a reformer, a poet, a philosopher, a thinker with a very passionate raging relationship with reality. A person with a great beautiful heart. Brecht is unimaginable with out his pacifist views, without his political position. This is an important part of his nature, these were matters of his heart, rather than running after the situation. This is the way I feel it. We have tried to weave a colorful carpet made of music and lyrics, biographical facts of his turbulent life in all its manifestations. As a result we have a play about a man, about creativity, about the artist and his painful search for truth. The word “cabaret” in the title of the play is not just a genre definition. German theatre of the early XX century gathered poets and composers, where they read new poems and played new unfamiliar music. Their disputes often ended in fights. Actually, the first collaborations of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil grew out of such a cabaret atmosphere, the famous “Threepenny Opera” in particular. We wanted to give the word its original meaning. But, of course, in the title of the play the word “cabaret” is used in a metaphorical sense, symbolizing the variety of life as a colorful palette, as an ardent entanglement, where there are songs, poems and drama, and death and love and politics.

Yuriy Butusov

Golden Mask Award 2016 - “Best actor” (Sergey Volkov)

Nominated – “Drama, best large scale production”, “Best director

Participant of the programme «RussianCase» 2016