King Lear - a legendary performance of the artistic director of the Sakha Academic Theater named after P.A. Oyunsky Andrei Borisov.
In 1998 the play was nominated for the Russian National Award "Golden Mask", and in the same year the play was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation.
Theater critic Anna Stepanova defined this event as "a renaissance of the Russian national theater, which caused in the following years outstanding performances and entire acting schools - Buryat, Finno-Ugric, Tatar theaters..."
In January 2015, the premiere of the revival of the play took place with a new cast, the new version is played by the younger generation of the troupe. But in the role of King Lear - its first and only performer, awarded for the creation of the role of the State Prize of the Russian Federation, Honored Artist of Russia, People's Artist of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) Efim Stepanov.
Andrei Borisov interpreted Shakespeare's tragedy in the spirit of the “olonkho” theater, revealed the epic beginning and not only archaized the circumstances, but also mixed the times.
"Decisively mixing, Borisov revitalizes in "timeless" Shakespeare the ruthlessness of our catastrophic time. The characters and fates of the characters - the departing former, the treacherous new - intersect on the same plane of existence, where values are unchanging." Nyurguyana Tomskaya, Istroiko-Kulturologicheskiy Zhurnal Ilin, 1998
"Borisov consistently constructs a world in which, first and foremost, his ruler is deprived of moral bearings. That is why all other virtues fall apart like a house of cards at the first whiff of wind". Natalia Kaminskaya, "Kultura" newspaper, 1998.
"Yakutia's "King Lear" is a play about the collapsed world, about inhumanity, suppressing one by one all life's beginnings, about disintegration, becoming more and more rapid and irreversible. The columns of dust raised above the almost empty stage by the car tires rolling across it, which become for Lear an unreliable shelter in a storm, a bed and a scaffold - a powerful, truly tragic metaphor, conveying the innermost meaning of Andrei Borisov's performance, which once again proved that Shakespeare really has no end". Alexey Zverev, "Strastnoy Boulevard", 1998.
The play is in Yakut language with simultaneous translation into Russian.
