Holy Fool tickets

Interesting exploration of the role of art under a dictatorship and of the moral duty of an artist to make a stand in the name of intellectual freedom.

A very poor production, weighed down by the most primitive stereotypes. What, for instance, was the samovar doing on stage? Chekhov famously observed that if a gun appears on stage, it must eventually be fired. By the same principle, one kept waiting for the samovar to acquire some dramatic purpose. What exactly is the connection between Shostakovich and a samovar? Even worse was the portrayal of the composer’s wife. Shostakovich’s first wife, Nina Varzar, was an astrophysicist and an intellectual; here, however, she seems to have wandered in from a cheap American film about Russians, forever knocking back vodka from faceted glasses and swearing like a trollop. In the end, Holy Fool amounts to little more than a dull, linear retelling of Shostakovich’s biography, seemingly gleaned from Wikipedia and, I suspect, heavily indebted to Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time, padded out with endless references to the most tired clichés about Russians and the Soviet Union. Neither illuminating nor dramatically compelling — simply tedious. Very poor indeed.

Past is a ghost that constantly showing up. Great story but lighting design could be better.