Premiere of Bergman’s Drama at Royal District Theater
Review
On November 22-23, a premiere took place at the Royal District Theater seeing young female director Sophio Kelbakiani stage ‘From the Life of the Marionettes,’ based on the well-known namesake movie drama of Ingmar Bergman.
Successful businessman Peter Egerman is deeply in love with his wife, and yet is ready to kill her at any instant.
“I tried to offer separate scenes as physical evidence to spectators by means of fragmented story-telling,” Ingmar Bergman wrote about the original film. “I have consciously denied any definitions: this is a case is for spectators to unknot. There is not a single character who will tell the whole truth or reveal their own motives. Here, all of them are guilty in different ways”.
Well-known Nani Chikvinidze is the only experienced cast member in Kelbakiani’s stage version, playing the mother of the protagonist Peter (Giorgi Sharvashidze). His wife, Katarina, is well-embodied by Natuka Kakhidze. It is difficult to figure out whether her character really has lovers. To be more exact, she searches for them. On this hazardous journey, she meets psychiatrist (Gaga Shishinashvili), her husband’s doctor who openly flirts with her.
Peter drinks a lot and sleeps less and less. He says that he finds joy in nothing, confessing that even though he hates his wife and the universe, he is still eager to watch her body moving, having wild sex with her without feeling. He asks his psychiatrist to help him, as he has a savage desire to kill his wife; however, the latter responds that there is “hardly any medicine to cure the human mind”.
“We tried to see this drama from our own prism,” Kelbakiani told GEORGIA TODAY. “We studied what influences society can have on a person, be it in upbringing or other factors. The process was extremely complicated, as the material is very difficult to work with. The whole two months of preparation was full of discoveries”.
“This role was particularly psychological,” actor Sharvashidze told us. “We had to do a lot of research. I learned what a catastrophe bad relations can lead to in one’s life, career and family: one has to fully analyze everything. It’s better to end such unhealthy relations, otherwise, it can end tragically,” he added.
The drama was translated by Guram Ghonghadze and the set decoration is by Elisabed Chichinadze from the Gogi Alexi-Meskhishvili Design School.
The film ‘From the Life of the Marionettes’ was directed in 1980. It was produced in West Germany, as Ingmar Bergman was at the time a tax exile from his native Sweden. The title is an excerpt from a quotation in ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’ by Carlo Collodi.
Maka Lomadze