"My aim is for the audience to leave the performance in silence and think about how they have treated the people around them. Could it have been better, more attentive? Did he take responsibility? Could he have reached out his hand but didn't?...?
Don't be afraid to lend a hand, don't push into the abyss... "
Directed by Suren Shahverdyan
********
This is a play about the collapsing world of today. Written in 1947, recognised as one of the world's finest works of drama and awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the play remains highly relevant. The re-evaluation of spiritual existence and values has a new ring today.
The love of money, the focus on a comfortable life, overshadows the decline of human relationships. People cease to be human. The world is becoming wild.
Blanche, the heroine of the play, a descendant of French aristocrats who settled in the United States several hundred years ago, educated and sophisticated, and belonging to a different social class, comes to visit her sister in New Orleans, a neighbourhood inhabited by a new generation of immigrants. With a sensitive and fragile nature, she cannot come to terms with the world around her. "My life depends on the kindness of the first person I meet", she says. Is this the Stanley that symbolises today's brutal world?
The play explores the theme of human loneliness and the struggle to grasp at anything that will help us escape the inevitability of existence, that will make us realise that there is no such thing as absolute happiness, that we are all alone in this harsh world.
It is an expressive performance that has an emotional impact on the viewer who is on stage with the characters. They are all complicit in what is happening in the play.
ATTENTION: Smoking and smoke are used in the performance.
