You can make a play about King Lear, or you can simply make it about Lear. About Lear as a person.
The same approach was used in Andrei Goncharov’s «Hamlet.» His play is about family, about parent‑child relationships. It doesn’t matter who the king is, who the queen is, who the prince is, and who is deprived of power or endowed with it. There’s a mother, and the men are fighting for the mother’s attention. This is not a loud, flashy, slogan‑driven «Hamlet,» where everything is said beautifully and loudly. Quiet speech makes the story not regal, but domestic. The whole issue lies in the pathology of personal relationships. And everything falls apart when there is no peace in the soul, in the family, when the family is destroyed.
The conflict of the play lies in human jealousy, in the struggle for Gertrude. The symbiosis between mother and father is breaking down, and as a result of this rupture, the child ceases to be calm; all the ailments that the mother spoke about in childhood are revealed. Hamlet’s neurosis is passed on to all the characters. These are subtle, private experiences, not matters of state importance. And in Hamlet, this idea of lost self‑identification unfolds into an appeal directly to the viewer. Who am I, what is the purpose of my life? Where is the meaning? Why do we live? «Hamlet» has always evoked questions of self‑identification. Who are we, and what are the characteristics of our generation, where are we heading?
In creating the staging, translations by Anna Radlova, Andrey Kroneberg, K. R., and Mikhail Morozov were used.
The performance features musical works by Giulio Caccini and Kuzma Kotrelev.
