This performance is based on one of the most popular works by F.M. Dostoyevsky – the Gambler.
Dostoyevsky is one of the authors that Valery Fokin’s artistic career is inextracibly connected to.
In 1968 he directed his graduation performance based on the Another Man's Wife and a Husband under the Bed, later he used the Notes from the Underground and the Bobok pieces. The Double performance has been on the stage of Alexandrinsky Theatre since 2005. There has been a good reason for Fokin to stage the Gambler. The logic of his creativity and artist’s career make the Director stage this novel by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky raising, perhaps, one of the most pressing questions of the modern age.
The topic of gambling which enslaves human souls and makes people give up all the best in them is the key topic of the entire performance. The ZERO Liturgy is about zealous devotion to the zero, emptiness, fiction. It inevitably leads to the decay of people’s personalities. This is what Dostoyevsky’s Gambler is about. This novel is the author’s most autobiographical works. In his performance, Valery Fokin develops the same idea.
The performance is produce with the final support of the Ministry of Culture of Russia and the North-Western Bank of Sberbank of Russia
The first night took place on the 10th November 2012
Media about the
“While for the author of the Gambler, it is a story of madness and death, one of the first chapters of Dostoyevsky’s whirlwind of anthropology; for Valery Fokin it is, first of all, a great metaphor for the Zeitgeist, an image of mindless serving the void which absorbs and disintegrates souls”.
Marina Tokareva. Time places its bet on the ZERO and sings the anthem of vanity.
Novaya Gazeta, February 2013
“This performance righteously lacks the charm of resort romance or the rapture of gambling. It’s not a routine sketch about the degradation of personality caused by gambling. The Zero Liturgy is an all-covering story of imminent soul death caused by succumbing to the temptation to place a bet on the void and to serving immediate and spontaneous values which by no means can be called eternal”.
Elena Gerusova. Alexandrinsky roulette
Kommersant, November 2012
“Putting the details of Alexei Ivanovich’s life aside, Fokin brings to the fore a decisive, clever, and wealthy character. She is feared and toadied to. The Grandmother starts with something every decent person aims at: she wants to knock down the Zero system”.
Evgeny Sokolinsky. Bets are off!
Strastnoy Bulvar, 2012
“Valery Fokin has directed a smart, intense, and beautiful performance about “the features of passion”: sacrificed love, ruined life, disappearing energy, the irresistible temptation of the roulette, and people willingly placing their bets on the Zero”.
Olga Egoshina. On the features of passion
Novye Izvestia, February 2012
“This performance is perfect by its form. I dare add that each character on the stage is so clear-cut and vivid, that it would be too difficult to rehearse the performance to a higher degree of solution immaculacy and acting quality”
Irina Korneeva. Naked nature
Rossiyskaya Gazeta, November 2012
