Wiener Festwochen 2010: A jég – Ice

Wiener Festwochen 2010: A jég - Ice
Vladimir Sorokin / Kornél Mundruczó

Date: 02. jun to 04. jun, 20:30
Venue: HALLE E+G / HALLE G

Play / Budapest / Premiere in the German-speaking region

By Vladimir Sorokin
For spectators aged 18 and over

Following his Frankenstein Project, Kornél Mundruczó returns to the festival with this high octane adaptation of Sorokin\'s best seller Ice, a monstrous vision of Eastern European life as a lonely fight for survival under a ruthless totalitarian sect.

Modern-day Moscow is the hunting-ground of a mysterious sect, a brotherhood of light, whose members are searching for other brothers and sisters. It is their plan to re-order a Creation that has gone sour. For this, however, 23,000 light brothers and light sisters must first be found. It begins with harmless Russian citizens being suddenly killed with ice-picks by colleagues, friends or relatives: the victims\' chests are beaten savagely, and if the heart inside that chest can speak to the brothers in the sect, they are allowed to live. Their lives are changed forever. After the ecstatic heart-to-heart contact, all other emotions seem stale. Unfortunately, they must linger, for the time being, in a world despoiled by sex and violence before all the other speaking hearts have been found. In the first part of the production, we sample fast, fragrant, depraved life in a two-storey building that the acrobatic, frenzied performers - jumping from bathtubs across storeys to land on motorcycles - transform into an elevated railway, disco, petrol station. In the second part, we sit at the heart of life, watching the lair of the blond sect with its pine forest, chirping birds and marching sounds. Vladimir Sorokin and Kornél Mundruczó present East European everyday life as a lonely struggle for survival and as the totalitarian dream of a superior élite.

His Frankenstein Project shown at Wiener Festwochen 2009 made film and stage director Kornél Mundruczó a much sought-after European cult director.

copyright:
© Eszter Gordon