THE SON

In the play by the French playwright Florian Zeller, the main character, a teenager, falls into a severe depression after the divorce of his parents and at the end kills himself. The parents try to help him, but they fail. There is something poisonous within their child, like air after nuclear war. All links have been broken. The characters clutter the world with floods of meaningless words. Director Yuri Butusov portrays the fundamental ineffability of a complex person with eccentric stop-and-go dances. As if in slow-motion, we see fragments of fragile human souls explode and slowly crumble. The persistent and silent unwillingness to live on equates with the cosmos turning into chaos. In Butusov's production, each person is abandoned and broken, and is unable even to ask for help. But if he could, the desolate world would have responded with a tragic silence.