This cooperative story began in the great era of municipal life, right after the Patriotic War, on the Petrograd Side, when street life began to revive, with all its patterns and marvelous wonders…
The play based on the prose of Eduard Kochergin is a kaleidoscope of stories about «botanical girls» who sell themselves near the Botanical Garden in post‑war Leningrad and, together, raise the daughter of a fallen comrade, embodying in the orphaned girl their own unfulfilled dreams of a better, pure, fairy‑tale life…
Eduard Kochergin is a master of stage design and, for more than half a century, has been the chief artist at the St. Petersburg BDT. But there is another side to Kochergin, no less well‑known. Eduard Stepanovich is the author of seven books in which he tells about his life, his profession, what he has seen and what kind of people he has met, including during the wanderings he experienced in his childhood. The child of repressed parents, in the victorious year of 1945, at the age of 8, he escaped from an orphanage in Omsk and spent almost seven years making his way on his own to his native Leningrad. The play «Giselle Botanica» is based on his stories about the inhabitants of the Leningrad «underworld,» full of sympathy and heart‑wrenching tenderness for the people maimed by the war.
Nikita Kobelev, the director of the production, has already worked with Kochergin’s prose: in 2012, he was the author of a radio play based on the book «Baptized with Crosses.»
