Голый король (The Naked King, 2014)

The Russian Theatre Group staged three performances of Evgeny Shvarts’ The Naked King in 2014. The play was closely linked to director Jesse Gardiner’s research:

“When we staged The Naked King I was simultaneously writing about the play for my PhD thesis and so directing it allowed me to appreciate new aspects of the text. So much of it is about hierarchy and the significance of rank. We played a game with the cast where they had to walk around the room and whenever they came across someone more important than them in the world of the play they had to bow to them. If someone failed to bow then you had to report them to the ‘overseer’ (me) and I wrote their name into a notebook. Three strikes and you were out of the game. The idea was to develop an awareness of hierarchy in the actors’ minds but with this lingering sense of an authoritarian police state in the background.”

Jesse and Laura also felt that the play would provide students with some interesting parallels with contemporary Russia:

“We thought the play’s theme of speaking truth to power would be interesting for the students, not only in relation to their studies of Soviet history but also present day Russia. Putin was becoming a pariah in the Western media at the time because of the crisis in Ukraine. I think a few months after our performances an effigy of him was burned at the Lewes bonfire parade! So there was a resonance with contemporary perceptions of Russia as an autocratic power as well.”