BAILE DE MÁSCARAS (The Masquerade)

I always freeze time because mankind is not expressed through speed

- RIMAS TUMINAS

During a five-year spell as head of the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, the distinguished director, Rimas Tuminas, enjoyed one of the biggest successes of his career with his minimalist and poetic production of The Masquerade. In his skilled and perfectionist hands, the text of the poet-successor to Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, became a powerful re-reading of the myth of Othello, in which the driving forces of the human soul are jealousy and indifference. It was an historic event which could be singled out for its magisterial stage direction, renouncing modern techniques and avant-garde style. A firm defender of tradition, he resorts to the essence of theatre for his works - the actor and the spoken word: "If we want to see snow, we will see it. The actor creates everything - that is the biggest, the greatest miracle".

In 2010, Tuminas revisited this Russian literary classic with a new production which premiered in January at the Yevgeny Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre and which can now be seen for the first time in Spain at the Festival de Otoño en primavera. A ghostly masked ball marked by the rhythm of human passions in which the set designer provides just the right mix of irony, romanticism and mystery to evoke a previous world which will never return. Evgeny Knyazev, a veteran Russian actor known internationally for his work with his mentor, Piotr Fomenko, takes the part of Arbenin, the lover who falls into a spiral of madness after losing a bracelet.

www.vahtangov.ru