Famous avant-garde director Andriy Zholdak presents a play based on the comedy by Carlo Goldoni. The paradoxical director is not new to the text of Goldoni. Some time ago in Kharkiv, he staged an atmospheric play "Four and a Half. Goldoni. Venice," making the legendary city on water its main character. The Petersburg production is not a remake, but a completely new play. According to him, the production is much harsher, more ironic, and more cynical than his previous works based on Goldoni's plays, although the director himself does not consider himself a provocateur. The play represents the dream of a mad scientist searching for the formula of love. Here, action, thriller, and commedia dell'arte are mixed, and the characters are shown through the lens of modernity. At the center of the play are the images of a Man and a Woman, separated and trying to find each other despite time and distance, life and death. The famous text of Goldoni is presented from the perspective of a person who does not believe in this text - a modern indifferent person. For Zholdak, such an arrangement of accents is not typical, as he usually achieves from the actors a belief in the text; this is his first play of this kind. The play features a young generation of BDT artists, for some of whom this is their first major premiere. According to Zholdak himself, his work is already considered classical in Europe. But in Russia, the director is perceived as an experimenter, and his productions evoke the most ambiguous responses. Zholdak's latest work, which appeared on the Petersburg stage, was Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin" at the Mikhailovsky Theater, the plot and images of which he interpreted in a surrealistic key. The surrealism, so characteristic of Zholdak's work, is also manifested in his other productions of classical texts, including Turgenev's "A Month in the Country." One of the central ideas, as in the play based on Goldoni, here becomes "objectification," the likeness of people, the absence of individuality, and mechanistic nature. You can find even more plays in St. Petersburg on our website.