Macbeth's Post-Crime Reflection Play Premieres at Osobnyak Theater

On January 23 and 24, the Osobnyak Theater stage will host the premiere performances of Sonya Dymshits«s play »Macbeth: A Fool«s Tale». This intimate work is dedicated to exploring the mechanics of tyranny and the disintegration of the self.

Director Sonya Dymshits has removed all external events from Shakespeare«s play — the battle scenes, conspiracies, and appearances of the witches. The focus remains solely on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who are presented not as powerful rulers but as beings surviving in an empty castle filled with terror. The murder of King Duncan becomes for them the starting point of an unstoppable fall.

The Shakespearean plot serves here as a prologue to a state where political tyranny becomes merely a backdrop for an internal, psychological tyranny that corrodes the self from within. Macbeth and his wife, constantly swapping roles in a perverted duet, lose not only their connection to the world but also the clear boundaries of their own «I».

The question of external retribution, such as the coming of Birnam Wood or Macduff, remains open — the inevitability of internal collapse is more important here.

The performers« duo — Anna Budanova and Artem Raguzin — becomes the main driver of this complex psychological machine. Their performance is built on a fusion and almost symbiotic dependence, where one becomes an extension of the other»s nightmare.

The play allows one to trace what kind of inhuman emptiness arises in the place of a committed atrocity. The phrase «life is a tale told by an idiot» in the context of the production loses its poetic nuance and acquires a bitter, clinical meaning: all that remains of great passions and terrible crimes is the incoherent, repetitive monologue of those who have outlived themselves.

The age restriction for viewing is 16+.