KAFKA. Director Kirill Serebrennikov

Kafka lived a life of an ordinary clerk, withdrawn and modest, literature was his secret passion. As he confessed, he felt that Flaubert, Dostoyevsky and Gogol were like “blood brothers” to him, but Kafka’s will was to have all his works burned after his death. However his friends did not fulfill his last will. Kafka’s texts, which are filled with bizarre images and paradoxical plots, where published posthumously and brought him worldwide popularity. Today Kafka is referred to as a genius prophet, who has foreseen the insanity of the XX century, and his name now is a synonym to a specific type of absurdity.    

Kafka’s life was full of passionate desire to create, his texts contain a great source of energy, and the creators of this production aimed to show his personality at its maximum and in all its inner complexity. In this work by Kirill Serebrennikov biographical motives from the writer’s life are intertwined with plots generated in his imagination; and characters from Kafka’s bestiary act side by side with real people. According to the plan of the playwright Valeriy Pecheikin we see on stage characters of Kafka’s “inner biography”: starting with flying doggies and Gregor Samsa, who has become an insect-like creature, and strange Odradek  and people that inhabited the heroes dreams – to end with. 

Playwright Valeriy Pecheikin: The most difficult thing was finding the key to absurdity and reproducing it on stage, which should not be confused with delirium. Kafka’s absurdity has a rigid inner logic, to discover it was one of my challenges. As it seems, we are still living in a world were absurdity is the measure of all and the only thing we have left to do is repeat after Kafka: “I would like to bring the world to purity, truth and firmness”

Designer: Kirill Serebrennikov
Playwright: Valeriy Pecheikin
Choreographer: Evgeniy Kulagin
Video-designer: Ilya Shagalov

Starring: Odin Byron, Irina Bragina , Anton Vasiliev, Irina Vybornova, Sergey Galakhov, Oleg Guschin, Marat Domanski, Dmitriy Zhuk, Rita Kron, Nikita Kukushkin, Yulia Loboda, Svetlana Mamresheva, Andrey Polyakov, Evgeniy Sangadzhiev,  Evgeniy Kharitonov / Ilya Romashko, Semen Steinberg