Exiled Russian theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov has created a poetic, tapestry-like production about Soviet film director Sergei Parajanov, also a victim of the regime, at Hamburg’s Thalia theatre. Is history repeating itself?

In a booklet printed for the premiere of ‘Legend’, Russian emigre theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov (b. 1969) tells the story of the origins of the production. Upon receiving a proposal to create something for the German theatre festival Ruhrtriennale 2024 he first tried to explain who Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990) was to Ivo van Hove, the festival´s director by mentioning the likes of Antonioni, Fellini, Kurosawa and Yves Saint-Laurent. Then, he realized that all these admirers of Parajanov were no longer alive. Suddenly he recalled Lady Gaga’s video ‘911’, based on motifs from one of the Parajanov’s greatest masterpieces, ‘The Colour of Pomegranates’. He showed the video to van Hove who immediately approved the project, as Serebrennikov puts it ‘Lady Gaga helped this production to be born’.

Parajanov was one of the most brilliant, outstanding, and yet weird artists of the Soviet era. Originally from Tbilisi, he brought world-wide fame to Armenian, Ukrainian and Georgian cinema for such films as ‘The Colour of Pomegranates’ (1968), ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’ (1964), ‘Kyiv Frescoes’ (1965) and ‘Ashik- Kerib’ (1988). At the same time, he was a political prisoner.

An enfant terrible for Soviet officials, he was both a product and a victim of the very system that put an artist on a pedestal and gave him unlimited power – only if he served the regime or at least pretended to serve it.

As a person who turned all his life into one long performance, Sergei Parajanov was a threat to the Soviet regime by his very existence. Officially, court cases were brought against him for bribery, dealing in antiques and sodomy. The only thing that did not let investigators down was the criminal offence of homosexuality. Since Parajanov never hid his bisexuality.

He ‘was the freest man in an unfree country’, so said Bella Akhmadullina, one of the main poetesses of the Thaw. Arrested twice on fabricated charges, he spent about five years in Soviet prisons and camps and died in 1990 at the age of sixty-six.

It would have been his centenary year in 2024, and numerous theatre productions were staged to mark this anniversary: ‘Moranal’ by Ilia Moshchitsky (b. 1984) with his ‘Chronotope’ company which premiered in Yerevan ahead of the ‘Legend’ in Germany, and a film ‘The Lilac Wind of Parajanov’ by Uzbek director Ali Khamraev (b. 1937) was shown at the Rotterdam film festival.

Put briefly, if Moshchitsky paid tribute to the unique aesthetic of the ‘The Colour of Pomegranates’, Serebrennikov paid tribute to the epoch in which Parajanov lived and worked.

It was in the period after World War II and two waves of the Great Terror when, because of the Khrushchev Thaw, art began to flourish in the USSR. The so called ‘intelligentsia’ was reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Future directors, such different personalities as Andrey Tarkovsky (1932–1986) and Vassily Shukshin (1929–1984) were studying on the same course at VGIK (Soviet State Institute of Cinematography), while their older colleague Parajanov was already filming ´Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors` in Kyiv, shocking officials with his unusual style and vision.

In Moscow, after years of banning ‘formalism’, for which one could pay with his or her life - like Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), the great Soviet theatre innovator, arrested in 1939 at the age of 67 and shot after several months of torture - the Taganka theatre appeared. It was the creation of Yuri Lyubimov (1917–2014), a Soviet actor who survived the terror in his youth and was not afraid of experimental theatre in early 1960s. He was also the first to hang Meyerhold's portrait in the foyer of his theatre. Taganka became a theatre that looked for and found a form to reflect its time, a place where people could say aloud what was usually only whispered. It became a place of pilgrimage and Parajanov also visited it – there are some photos in which he is standing next to Lyubimov.

As for Kirill Serebrennikov, he names Lyubimov among his main teachers. Serebrennikov´s now defunct ‘Seventh Studio’ and ‘Gogol Centre’ in Moscow, where he trained his artists and created his art, were often compared to Taganka.

‘Legend’, directed and written by Serebrennikov, starts with strong notes of Lyubimov. People in white papakhas, with brightly lined eyes, walk around the audience in Hamburg's ‘Thalia theatre’ where this coproduction with the Ruhrtriennale is based. They break the ‘fourth wall’ in a Brechtian and Lyubimovian way (Lyubimov was the first in Soviet theatre to stage Brecht), throwing some of their lines directly into the audience.

An actress dressed in white with a lace umbrella appears among them, Svetlana Mamresheva (b. 1988) one of Serebrennikov´s former students echoing Alla Demidova (b. 1936), a legendary actress at Taganka, who starred in Tarkovsky’s films and used to be one of Parajanov's favorites and looked exactly like this in some Lyubimov's productions.

Wearing a belly pillow and a white flannel instead of a grey beard, actor and singer Gurgen Tsaturyan (b. 1971) instantly becomes Parajanov. A gramophone is brought on stage, some coloured lights appear along with the bric-a-brac that Sergei Parajanov loved so much.

Creating his own set design, Serebrennikov turned Thalia´s big stage into a cluttered Tbilisi courtyard. While you watch it, you find yourself entering Parajanov’s childhood or perhaps Fellini's ‘Amarcord’. Consisting of ten episodes (or novellas), Serebrennikov’s production contains so many references and memories that one can see his own childhood in it and I saw mine too.

When I first came to interview Alla Demidova, she showed me two hats for the role of Ranevskaya in Chekhov's ‘The Cherry Orchard’, both made by Parajanov himself and in early 1980s he had sent them to her as a gift. He also made boxes to transport the hats and at home Demidova hung the bottom of one of the boxes on the wall like a painting. It was a collage: a fish made from lace, the fins combs with the caption: ‘Longing for black caviar’. In late 1990s this inscription made me long for something ghostly because then I could not remember the taste of caviar.

Having lost the ‘Gogol Centre’, a government-funded theatre in Moscow that Serebrennikov founded in Moscow in 2012 on the basis of the venerable and old-fashioned Moscow Drama Gogol Theater, which he ran for nine years, he has created his new team with actors from the ‘Seventh Studio’, who followed him into exile, as well as some of the actors from ‘Thalia’, including Svetlana Mamresheva, Odin Byron (b. 1984), Philipp Avdeev (b. 1991), Gurgen Tsaturyan, Nikita Kukushkin (b. 1990) - declared a foreign agent by the Russian authorities - as while as two brilliant German actors Falk Rockstroh (b. 1958) and Karin Neuhäuser (b. 1955). As in Lyubimov's poetic performances, in ‘Legend’ the role of Parajanov is played by all the actors in turn. Each represents one facet of Parajanov's complex personality.

The ‘shadows of forgotten ancestors’ come onto the stage, from a cemetery destroyed by the Tbilisi’ authorities. The father, who used to be a jeweller, the mother wearing a fur coat. Parajanov's stories about his childhood, his endless lies not for profit, just out of love for beauty – we see all of these in the performance. The mother sends little Seryozha to hang up his father's shirts in the street. It is nice to lick ‘frozen’ shirts. A tailor called Misha appears on the top of a wired structure, which replaces either a Tbilisi attic or a pigeon-house. He continues to sew shirts for Tbilisians who have long gone because no one else can do it like him.

The universe of ‘Legend’ is arranged in such a way that you begin to believe that in a parallel world, Misha is still sewing shirts while Yuri Lyubimov is still directing plays: one of them is about Sergei Parajanov, who used to be a friend of ‘Taganka’. And somehow Serebrennikov hears, sees and catches it all, transmitting it to us.

"Buy a Russian artist¨, says Philip Avdeev to Falk Rockstroh as if trading at a flea market. He offers up his fellow student Nikita Kukushkin like a slave. Falk refuses him, yet Avdeev insists. The fearless Kukushkin, who represents a carnival ‘grassroot’ side of Parajanov, immediately takes off his trousers, showing his arse. ‘Here it doesn't surprise anyone anymore,’ Avdeev observes. The Eastern desire to bargain, the bitter irony, the fearless buffoonery, as well as open homosexuality and even stoic restraint – all these are facets of Parajanov's personality.

Towards the finale, wearing a man's suit, Karin Neuhäuser also reincarnates as Parajanov, a Brezhnev-era prisoner: a stoic and an unstoppable performer. Here Parajanov has lost all hope of returning to the cinema and is emitting the last sparks of his bitter buffoonery. Behind his story one can see the fate of political prisoners today.

Consisting of ten carnivalesque novellas, in some places it seems laboured and excessive although masterfully done, 'Legend' feels like a great production. Especially for the German theatre, currently experiencing a crisis of direction. The previews must have been even more impressive as the Georgian chants were sung originally by a magnificent Georgian choir and now are only recorded.

Based ‘on motifs of Parajanov's worlds’ and at the same time Lyubimov's aesthetics, to contemporary audiences it is like a longing for black caviar, which they have probably never tasted! Nostalgia for the times when the Russian intelligentsia believed that an artist who was creating something beautiful could fix something rotten in society. Judging by the applause in the auditorium at the Thalia Theatre, the German audience understood that nostalgia.

The last ‘novella’ or tale in the show is a story about Parajanov in prison. Once, sweeping the camp yard, his superiors remarked that he was "working without a sparkle". So, he set his broom on fire. Karin Neuhäuser embodies this literally, with a lighted cigarette. And sweeps by coughing up the smoke, echoing Parajanov´s early death from lung cancer.

‘It’s enough, bring the curtain down,’ she says to someone upstairs. And, as if woven out of smoke, words appear on the backdrop: ‘Free all political prisoners’.