Stalin sonata (Sonáta pro Stalina, 1989)

Přidal: Přemek |

Duben 1, 2010

David Zaine Mairowitz. Rozhlasová hra. Na klavír hraje Mary Nash. Režie Richard Wortley.

Osoby a obsazení: Semyon Pavlovitch (Clive Merrison), Gaoler (Brian Miller), Mikhail Karlovitch (Philip Voss), Pavel Ilyitch (Ian Targett), Sophia Ivanovna, lékařka (Jane Leonard), Maria Llovna Djerzinskaya (Barbara Jefford), prokurátor (Donald Gee), bachař (Brian Miller).

Natočeno 1989. Premiéra 1. 8. 1989 (BBC Radio 3, London, 21:45 h.; 75 min.). Repríza 24. 7. 1990.

Pozn.: Giles Cooper / BBC Play Award, 1989.

Pozn. 2: 1938. Moscow. The Chief of Radio, receives a call instructing him to bring a particular record to Stalin. The thing is that all copies have been destroyed, and the artist imprisoned … Black comedy about the dilemma of a Russian broadcaster after Stalin requests a record by a pianist long since forgotten in a prison. A cheery little number about a pianist rendered a non-person by Stalin, all her records smashed…she is dragged into a studio to record a disc of a piece he has a whim to hear again. And in the course of the story, her fingers are broken, stopping her playing even in the cafe where she used to play popular tunes after her concert career was destroyed. (anotace)

Česká inscenace

Text in: Mairowitz, David Zane: Stalin sonata. London: A&C Black Publishers Ltd, 1990.

Lit.: anonym: David Zane Mairowitz – The Stalin Sonata. In web Suttonelms.org.uk, b. d. (anotace). – Cit.: At the end of the broadcast from Radio Moscow one night in 1938, the Chief of Radio, Mikhail Karlovitch, takes a telephone call from someone claiming to be Stalin and requesting a particular recording by pianist Maria Llovna Djerzinskaya, a feted concert performer from the 30s, to be brought to his Dacha by morning. The problem is that she was arrested, tortured and imprisoned on his orders years ago. Music libraries throughout the Soviet Union have been stripped of her back catalogue. She herself survives as a breathing corpse with broken fingers in the cells of the Lubyanka.

Was it really Stalin on the phone or a political enemy trying to bring him down? Is this some kind of test of political loyalty and discipline? How can one disappoint Stalin in one of his ‚melancholy moods’? „The Stalin Sonata“ takes the listener into a world dominated by the cult of the personality, where one’s very life is subject to the petty whim of the leader, and where to fail to please Him is unthinkable.