Half a century later, the performance of the artistic director of the Alexandrinsky Theatre Nikita Kobelev returns to the Alexandrinsky stage one of the most important plays not only of the Russian but also of the world repertoire of the XX century.

Today, Maxim Gorky's dramaturgy turns out to be consonant with our time and free from interpretations of the Soviet era.

For the first time Alexandrinsky Theater addressed the play “The lower depths” immediately after its creation, in 1902. The premiere did not take place, followed by the highest ban on the staging of Maxim Gorky's works on the imperial stage. “The lower depths” was first released here by director Yevtikhiy Karpov after the October Revolution, in 1919. In 1956, the play created by Leonid Vivien and Vladimir Ehrenberg was released and in 1973 it was renewed. This work in different years and in different casts brought together the coryphees of the troupe, in the performance took part: Vasily Merkuryev, Nikolai Simonov, Konstantin Skorobogatov, Yuri Tolubeyev, Bruno Freindlich, Igor Gorbachev, Olga Lebzak, Valentina Kovel and others.

Nikita Kobelev's production is the third staging of the play “The lower depths” at the Alexandrinsky Theater. And at the same time the third appeal of its artistic director to Maxim Gorky's dramaturgy. In 2015, Nikita Kobelev's performance “The Last ones” was staged at the Mayakovsky Theater in Moscow and “Summerfolk” was staged at Novosibirsk's “Old House” Theater in 2023.

A wanderer, a stranger named Luka enters the community of people who have lost almost everything and live, one might say, “on the margins of life”, and through his actions he changes, awakens to life, transforms the characters of this play, which leads them to different outcomes in the end. In “The lower depth” many themes are touched upon, such as love and death, truth and lies, faith in oneself and one's vocation, work and refusal of it, the search for reference points and supports in life.

Nikita Kobelev's approach is characterized by close attention to the meanings of the work and the manifestation of what makes them relevant at the moment. In the director's new work, the characters of the play will remain essentially the same homeless, confused people as in Gorky's work, but will be brought closer to the present day. At the same time, the authors of the performance would like to get away from the traditional reading of this play as a domestic, naturalistic play, and tell this story in figurative, conventional theatrical language.

“When I was thinking about this play, it became increasingly clear to me that this play is not quite a domestic play, it has a lot of parable, symbolist features, which was fashionable in the early 20th century, and this language, by the way, was not alien to Gorky himself in the 1890s. On the one hand, we try to reveal this peculiarity of the material by immersing our characters in the gap between reality and that “golden dream” consisting of illusions, dreams and memories of the past. And on the other hand - to give it a modern, moderately ironic sound and to see our characters as today's people in difficult crisis situations and wanting to find a way out of them. After all, the phrase “the lower depths”, as it seems to me, is even more about the internal state than the external one”. Nikita Kobelev

Cast: Igor Volkov (Luka), Sergei Parshin (Kostylev), Ivan Efremov (Pepel), Viktor Shuralyov (Baron), Ilya Isaev (Satin), Valentin Zakharov (Bubnov), Sergei Elikov (Kleshtch), Dmitry Buteev (The Actor), Vladimir Minakhin (Krivoy Zob), Vitaly Sazonov ( TheTatar), Yanina Lakoba (Vasilisa), Maria Kuznetsova (Kvashnya), Maria Lopatina (Nastya), Anna Seledets (Anna), Maria Medvedeva (Natasha).

 Premiere - February 14, 2025