The BRIDGE Theater presented the premiere performance of Georgy Dolmazyan's "The Ship Returns Home"

The BRIDGE Theater, with the support of the Charitable Foundation for the Development of the Moscow State University Student Theater, presented the premiere performance of Georgy Dolmazyan's "The Ship Returns Home" (16+). This production is based on the novel "Three Comrades" by Erich Maria Remarque. The director called the genre of his work an "epic revue", where the fates of the characters are intertwined into a common biography of an entire generation.

Georgy Dolmazyan is the author of "The Days of the Turbins", "Dostoevskaya. Anna's Dreams", "Memorial Prayer" — performances that have already entered the theatrical chronicle of Moscow — admits that five years ago he would not have approached the Remark. I didn't want to turn the classic into a "dusty museum and library author." But today, according to him, the German writer's prose turned out to be "incredibly modern." The theme of people stuck between two big wars, in search of happiness and love, suddenly became a mirror for the crossroads of modern times. "It seems to me that there is no need to explain any subtleties unnecessarily," says the director. "People after the war are in search of happiness and love."

The set design of the play "The Ship returns Home" was created by the artist Andrey Butyaev — it works like a time machine. At the back of the stage, the inscription "1948. Buenos Aires is like a mirage of a cherished harbor. The neon lights up the signs with the names of Berlin streets, which the main character cannot forget. A platform stretches across the entire stage, which transforms into a cabaret bar, then into the deck of a ship, then into the seashore.... Dolmazyan emphasizes that what is in front of the viewer is not a historical reconstruction, but an "honest story" about today, wrapped in authentic music, plastics and costumes.

The style of cabaret is not accidental here. In Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, this genre gave people the opportunity, in an easy, entertaining manner, to touch on what really hurt them and needed to come out. Remarque and the aesthetics of cabaret came together at some point. This is how songs, dances and that nervous vibe that Dolmazyan was looking for from the very beginning appeared on the stage. "So that it vibrates in a modern way, despite the maximum authenticity."

At the center of this vibration is the story of Robert, a man who, twenty years later, returns from Argentina to Berlin to walk through the fire of memory anew. Alexander Khoshabaev plays a mature Robert, and Ivan Orekhov plays his young version, the same Robbie, who does not yet know that love will be the only meaning. For Orekhov, the key to the role was the phrase: "If she dies, life will lose its meaning again." The actor admits that for his hero, love was not an end in itself, but the only way to find the lost purpose of his own being — and he found it in Patricia Holman. "It was a character who had no meaning in life before Pat," the actor clarifies. And he adds that the true understanding of love comes to Robbie only years later, already in Argentina, when returning to the cursed city becomes the only possible thing to do.

Anna Golotova, in the role of a sick Pat, plays a woman who does not postpone her life for later: every morning can be the final one, and she lives every minute at the limit of her feelings. It is no coincidence that the director chooses the finale for the play, which echoes Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, a book that, according to him, touched him very much at the age of seventeen. Argentina is not a geographical point here, but a fulfilled dream. "She's happy because he got to this place. This is his big love story for her," says Georgy Dolmazyan.

The play features many poignant scenes and images created by Evgeny Panferov, Mikhail Kazakov, Anatoly Safronikhin, Vladimir Volzhin, Natalia Panferova, Tatiana Stanislavskaya and other actors.