The official Tarelkin decides on a daring adventure - fakes a quick death, thereby getting rid of annoying creditors, and prepares to blackmail his former boss, General Varravin. However, the events develop quite differently from what Tarelkin had planned. Now his life is threatened by the most real danger.

Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin's macabre comedy, which inherits Gogol's satirical grotesque and in some ways anticipates the cruel Aberiut absurdity, has always beckoned the theater: the stage history of "The Death of Tarelkin" includes the big names of Meyerhold and Tovstonogov.

The young director Hugo Eriksen seeks to move away from the stage tradition of the sinister comedy of masks, which is firmly attached to Kobylin's play. His production is almost a kind of everyday realism. With one important exception: it is neither the historical reality of the 1860s nor the present day, but the 1990s, or rather the myth of the "dashing nineties", which lives in the mass consciousness and is depicted in art, mainly in the cinema.

Here is how the author of the play describes his idea: "It seemed to me that instead of the grotesque I could offer a kind of postmodernist move, namely - genre, that is, to play Sukhovo-Kobylin's play as a kind of crime story from the 90s, which I could watch on VHS as a child, to translate it into a Balabanov or Tarantino key, which, in my opinion, is not a violence to the text or a mockery of the classics, but, on the contrary, I would like to believe, will provide a graceful and ironic way to feel the pulsation of the author's content. I wanted to distance myself from today's agenda and place everything that is happening in a kind of mythologized, postmodern 90's, which is imprinted in a huge number of works of art, and play with these cultural codes".

Interview with the Director: https://drampush.ru/news/5981

Premiere : May 12, 2021

Tours and awards:

The play "Tarelkin's Death!" was included in the long-list of the National Theater Award "Golden Mask".

The play is a participant of the Biennale of theatrical art in Moscow (2021)