THE RED PRINCESS (ČERVENÁ PRINCEZNÁ)
M 1, F 2
a very black comedy about the past that is also ours.
Back in 1992 an extraordinary documentary movie was made mapping both the contemporary and past bizarre and dramatic life of Galina Brezhnev, Leonid Ilich Brezhnev’s, the Soviet Russia’s Communist leader’s daughter. It was the only film she agreed to appear in. The documentary ended on the words: “We will come back to her”.
Unfortunately, the follow up never happened – the reasons are anybody’s guess. We know that she finally ended up at an anti-alcoholic department of a Moscow hospital where she died in 1998, abandoned by everybody, destroyed, friendless and without any attention from anybody.
Peter Pavlac’s play explores the fictional (but not impossible) situation where a young ambitious filmmaker Oleg would approach Galina two years after the screening of the documentary mentioned (1994) to finish the work begun by the others. He arranges to meet Galina at her dacha (chalet) where he also meets her granddaughter Galya escaping there from her own home to find some sleep from an unending family curse. But, as the play shows, she’s also trying to escape from herself and from her own failure to come to terms with her childhood based on the empty ideals as represented by her granddad Leonid Brezhnev. Galya is able to persuade Oleg not to betray her to Galina – she asks him to pretend she is his assistant, indeed, she herself is sure Galina would not recognize her.
She would not – it seems at first. From this moment on, a tragicomic clockwork is running pushing all of the characters into the abyss of their own past. Galina reveals the mysteries of her three failed marriages and her several dozen love affairs. But, most of all, she reveals her strange vulnerability she’s trying to hide for years now behind alcohol. She reveals her attempts to escape and with them the depth of a strange fate tragedy of a woman who was mostly guilty because of the mere fact she was born Brezhnev’s daughter.
First of all, the play is a brilliant opportunity for an actress aged 50 to 60. The world premiere of the production opened at Astorka-KORZO Theatre in Bratislava on 5 May 2009.