Song of the Volga

One of the absolute peaks of creativity of the People's Artist of Georgia Rezo Gabriadze is the play “Song of the Volga, or the Battle of Stalingrad.” The premiere took place at the St. Petersburg Satire Theater on Vasilyevsky Island. “Song of the Volga” is a mixture of piercing everyday details, philosophical dialogues, fantasies, visions, where the viewer is equal to an ant and Stalin, a German general and a circus horse. This is a combination of a requiem and a children's game: the action takes place on a large table covered with sand, which, thanks to lighting, turns into a scorched steppe, into a river, into a grave mound, which is poured by the hand of the puppeteer over each successive dead character. In this chamber puppet show, Gabriadze rises to the metaphorical heights of epic.