A carnival event built on verbal duels - text-based "battles" - featuring conditional characters from William Shakespeare's play "The Merchant of Venice." The performance lives by the laws of street carnival acts. There are no right or wrong sides; any problem is turned upside down and ridiculed. "Farewell, flesh" - this is how the word "carnival" translates from Italian. In the plot of Shakespeare's play, the merchant Antonio borrows money from the moneylender Shylock, who sets a condition: if the money is not returned on time, he will cut off a pound of flesh from Antonio. Sharp issues of modernity - feminism, tolerance for various minorities, patriotism, the state, and much more - also turn into carnival masks. The battles are led and judged by Balthazar, played by the famous clown Anwar Libabov. The text based on William Shakespeare's play was written by Nastasya Khrucheva - a young composer from St. Petersburg and a bright interpreter of contemporary academic music. This is not her first experience collaborating with BDT. Nastasya is the author of the music for Andrei Moguchy's performances "Alice" and "What to Do?" In 2014, Nastasya Khrucheva defended her dissertation on a topic that touches on both music and text - "The Interaction of Music and Literature in the Works of Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, James Joyce." The play based on Shakespeare is the debut work of the young author directly on the text. The play was directed by a student of Georgy Alexandrovich Tovstonogov - theater and film director Vlad Furman, a holder of several theater awards, whose performances are staged at the "Russian Enterprise" named after Andrei Mironov and other theaters. You can find even more performances in St. Petersburg on our website in the theater section.