DRAMA
MASQUERADE / Michail Lermontow
Perm Academic Theatre
Perm,
Russia 2022
Stage director, set designer – Philipp Grigorian
Costume designer – Vlada Pomirkovanaya
Choreographer – Anna Abalikhina
Dramaturg – Olga Fedianina
We can say that Philip Grigorian's performance deromanticises Arbenin and exposes him. Evil remains evil, no matter how you paint it, violence remains violence, and in violence, as you know, only the rapist is to blame. He is not complex, this hero of Lermontov, not fastidious and not intellectualised, but the most ordinary tyrant and abuser, who laid the life of a woman on the altar of his madness and his anti-human ideas.
Your Leisure (Vash Dosug)
Philip Grigorian's interpretation of Lermontov's drama "Masquerade" is slasher style and very entertaining. From the first minutes the action captures the audience and arouses a storm of different emotions – from surprise, rejection and rejection to fear, disbelief and, finally, compassion for the characters in the play.
Screen and stage
The multi-hour action looks like a beautiful construction in its complexity. The unity of the idea and embodiment is also secured by the scenography, created by the director himself. With the smooth running of all its components Masquerade resembles an opera house. And the performance sounds like a complex polyphony, allowing you to follow the main theme or listen to the subchoruses.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
LUNAR FEAST / Pavel Pryazhko
Theatre on Malaya Bronnaya
Moscow,
Russia 2020
Stage director, set designer – Philipp Grigorian
Costume Designer – Vlada Pomirkovanaya
Choreographer – Anna Abalikhina
Dramaturg – Ilya Kukharenko
The Lunar Feast is a play for families, the plot of which seems simple: children set off on a journey to bring their parents, who have been trapped in a 'moonlight' captivity, back to Earth. Along the way, of course, challenges and adventures await them, meeting amazing characters", explains Philipp Grigorian. But the director offers not just a funny fairy tale with a happy ending, but builds a witty but tough story about today's youth.
Afisha
Grigorian, not only the director but also the set designer of his productions, here goes against the bad tradition of children's theatre, according to which magic "for the little ones" can be done as if not particularly diligently: they will believe it anyway. The most sympathetic thing about The Lunar Fest is the combination of the amusing conventionality of the reception with the unquestionable seriousness of its technical implementation.
Kommersant
Philipp Grigorian usually makes an artist's theatre out of Pryazhko's plays. "The Lunar Feast" is no exception: apparently, the director was most attracted and fascinated by the possibility of "replaying" both computer games and Disney animation, with which today's children are overfed, in the visual solution. And for viewers of 10+, this is a major benefit: in terms of space and the atmosphere poured into it, a lot has been done in an inventive manner. For example, the dark garden, with its flickering shadows of birds and swaying cypresses, seems to be blown through by cosmic winds and surrounded by an ominous "nothingness". It's pure suspense in a child's dosage.
Teatral
MAYAKOVSKY. TRAGEDY / Vladimir Mayakovsky
Gogol-Center
Moscow,
Russia 2017
Stage director, set designer – Philipp Grigorian
Choreographer – Anna Abalikhina
Costume designer – Galya Solodovnikova
Dramaturg – Ilya Kukharenko
In Russia there is the only one director, who is interested in the grotesque theatricality as a method – his name is Philipp Grigorian. Grigorian’s visual language is European carved, and the lightness with which he appropriates camp and dilutes grave narrative with postmodern inserts amazes. “Mayakovsky”, divided into three parts, all of which could in fact exist as a separate performance on their own, leads the viewer to a cathartic, but at the same time soft and quiet finale. By the way, Grigorian’s ability of achieving a catharsis without extra noise absolutely deserves attention.
Esquire
In each new performance Grigorian raises the level of complexity in his riddles. In his first work in Gogol-Center Grigorian also raises stakes. You won’t understand anything, and you will like that. As befits a significant object of contemporary art the horizon of interpretations of what is happening on the stage is unlimitedly wide. Aesthetically it is even easier: the director parses bona fide the fumed futuristic text by “Stanislavsky’s method”, fits it on to the culture code of modernity and looks what will come out.
Afisha Daily
The relevant reality constantly smolders in the performance, but it flares up several times – like in the case with construction film which is of course “the striped face of condemned boredom” from a poem by Mayakovsky as though peeking into a century ahead. But the most pithiest image are the huge titles that says “Immersive sporting-symphonic performance “The piano on ice””, which appear with the bravura sounds of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 and seems to unite all of what you can see today on stage, arena, tv or a phone. Not without surprise you start to realize that the language of Sots-art, which was nearly forgotten, once again be- comes a perfect tool to describe Russian reality, which is more and more successful at competing with the theatre of the absurd.
Vedomosty
ILLUSION / Pierre Corneille
The Red Torch Theatre
Novosibirsk,
Russia 2017
Stage director, set designer – Philipp Grigorian
Script – Olga Fedyanina
Costume designer – Vlada Pomirkovannaya
Choreography-director – Anna Abalikhina
The characters are more like characters from modern action movie or popular comics. The story of Klondors escape from his father’s house is played out by all the members of the performance as a magic extravaganza. Sooner or later a deception is detected behind every coulisse.
Novosibirsk News
How many different faces can a character have, how many magical fantasies should be distroyed in order to find the truth? Is it possible to find it – and is it always necessary? Oddly enough, the answer in the XVII century is the same as in the XXI.
Culture.rf
TARTUFFE / Jean-Baptiste Moliere
Stanislavsky Electrotheatre
Moscow,
Russia 2016
Stage director, set designer – Philipp Grigorian
Costume designer – Galya Solodovnikova
Choreographer – Anna Abalikhina
nominee for the Golden Mask
National Theatre Award
The director Philipp Grigorian explores the nature of human pietism and extraordinary credulity by sending his characters to a journey through time and space.The stage is divided into two zones. To watch the performance the audience has to go from one side to another. This structure intrigues both the audience and the artists.
Kultura TV Channel
Grigorian sees Tartuffe as a chthonic creature. That’s why the main character is longhaired, bearded and appears from under the stage surrounded by clouds of smoke. He has his vulgar, Rasputin-like pronunciation, his movements are slow and tight, his manners are bad – he doesn’t hesitate to put his big, dirty boots on a snow-white tablecloth. At the same time, in one scene this infernal monster traces a chalk round and prostrates inside it to hide himself. As if the Satan was not inside
he himself but the people surrounding him. And he has the right to be
sly – as he is not only prude and hypocrite but also a fake saint, a devotee.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
Classical and postmodern aesthetics multiply one another like two mirrors facing each other. One gets dizzy by looking into it.
Saint-Petersburg Theatre Magazine
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE / Anthony Burgess
Theatre of Nations
Moscow,
Russia 2016
Stage director – Philipp Grigorian
Set and costume designers – Philipp Grigorian, Vlada Pomirkovannaya
Choreographer – Sergey Zemlyansky
Script – Yuriy Klavdiyev, Google Translator,
Ilya Kukharenko
Philipp Grigorian did not only become absorbed in the novel itself but also in the biography of the author, who pictures himself as the writer Alexander F., with the manuscript of A Clockwork Orange on the desk, who sees his own wife raped in front of him by Alex’s band. The performance turned out to be not about the main character but about the writer who lives and smashes his broken life into his typewriter. To involve the spectator into this “broken and wounded text” the director with the scriptwriter Yuriy Klavdiyev copy pasted some of the phrases in the Google Translate system. The verbs don’t conjugate, the words are irreparably disjoint. The world itself is disjoint. The scenes succeed, performance gives place to a traditional psychological theatre, with
dark humour and good acting.
Kommersant
A Clockwork Orange is Grigorian’s first project since the interdisciplinary Fullmoon (2011), that doesn’t fit into the ordinary drama or opera genre definitions: the narrative is not linear, words don’t always have meanings, talking scenes alter with long mime scenes. We see an absolutely free composition: for instance, the director adds a video insert in the middle of the performance – a brutal short-length thriller about a kidnapping featuring the same actors playing completely different roles. One of the surprises of this premiere – its sudden similarity to Romeo Castelucci’s works, this prominent figure of the Western “artist’s theatre”. Until recently we thought that he did not have followers in Russia.
Colta.ru
Chaos grows as a distinct speech mixes up with mechanical nonsense – the authors have put the text into the Google Translate system, and the result is the best expression of the unhuman nature of the performance. The fear of the main character materialises – with twinkling headlights and low voice from the speaker appears the black knight wearing Batman armour and Farinelli-like feathers. This is how the evil is represented in mass culture, this is how power looks like in the juvenile mind, this almighty alter-ego is hiding in the deep consciousness of the frightened and civilised author, who is seemingly striking against and unconsciously generating the evil at the same time.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
THE MARRIAGE / Nikolai Gogol
Theatre of Nations
Moscow,
Russia 2015
Stage director, set designer – Philipp Grigorian
Costume designer – Galya Solodovnikova
Choreographer – Olga Prikhudaylova
This Gogol’s play with its old Russian vocabulary and all others long gone phenomena is presented with an extra contemporary visual means: a bachelor apartment with red couch, a typical Russian-style cafe, drugs
of all kinds, even transparent ballot-boxes. Ksenia Sobchak fits perfectly into this composition – who else can play a modern matchmaker? The production is dazzlingly mind-blowing, grotesque and multicolored like a traditional Russian wrap. And this colorful package hides a performance about the eternal meanings in the vain world of temptation, lie and absurdity.
Buro 24/7
Grigorian is a rare type of a director-designer, who is used to set both
the brightness and the contrast to the maximum level. The best way to color in neon the musty air of Gogol’s play (the text was offered by Theatre of Nations who has dedicated this season to Russian classics)
is to feed your characters with drugs. The adventures of Podkolesin and Kochkarev are transformed into a long-lasting and painful trip in front of
a kebab deli – what other job would a simple lonely Russian woman do? And, of course, the altered state of consciousness of the main characters justifies in a Monthy Python way all the phrases and all the twists
by Hunter Thompson’s radiant logic.
Afisha Vozdukh
Glamour and war – these are the two pillars of the modern television – support Philipp Grigorian’s The Marriage. Sugar-sweet poster – 50 shades of pink – gives an exact image of the production. The Marriage turns out to be Grigoryian’s most politically charged production: his characters live in a military society, in a society of a legitimate violence, society accustomed to agression in between the match-making TV shows.
Colta.ru
SHAKESPEARE. THE LABYRINTH
/ First promenade theatre play in Moscow
Theatre of Nations
Moscow,
Russia 2014
Curator, stage director, set designer – Philipp Grigorian
Costume designer, set designer – Galya Solodovnikova
Script – Olga Fedyanina
with participation of:
Moscow Museum of Modern Art
Timofey Kuliabin, Yuriy Kviatkovskiy and others
What’s so good about being chained to a particular seat and row? It’s much more fun to wander with fellow spectators around the Theatre of Nations. Staircases, cloakroom, buffet and the audience
–installations and small theatre performances on shakespearian themes everywhere. Almost all of them are entertaining and fascinating, and, of course, none of them is greasy. Shakespeare
is treated here without ceremony, as a colleague or a friend, and sometimes it’s no sin make fun of him.
Colta.ru
This anniversary excursion Shakespeare. The Labyrinth is an unpretentious, punk, juvenile but an ambitious interpretation of
a Shakespeare myth, blistering and irresponsive like Wikipedia.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
With such an informal celebration of Shakespeare’s anniversary, without pretentious speeches and official narrative, Theatre of Nations proved that the hero of the day is still young at heart, to whom no prank is alien. He is truly universal, open to all kinds of genre plays and interpretations.
Izvestiya
THE STONE / Marius von Meyenburg
Theatre of Nations
Moscow,
Russia 2013
Stage director, set designer – Philipp Grigorian
Costume designer – Galya Solodovnikova
The Stone based on a Marius von Meyenburg’s play, as all the others works of this director, blinds with a bright visual form, a very stylish image. Several layers of the German history come to life on stage –
a grand daughter wants to write a composition about her valiant grandfather, who’s history loses all its gloss and shine, transforming from the epic story of an antifascist into a nasty anecdote, well hidden into a family’s closet of decency.
Afishaplus.ru
Philipp Grigoran’s productions – visionary and absurdist vaudevilles – are always a unique combination of styles. This time the violet, the blue and the red remind of Bob Wilson and invite the audience into the infrasonics of the memory mysteries. It is a tricky thing to combine the infernal, distorted, stone-like territory of a public memory and vaudeville.
Free Press
Looks as if Philipp Grigorian, who always designs himself his productions, has compressed the time, placing all the five epochs on stage. On the small decks placed on a green lawn – the furniture of the same room in different times: an elegant Art Nouveau-style bureau, a miserable communal East German kitchen and finally modern stylish furniture. The actors only have to make one step to travel 10 years into the future or into the past just slightly changing the appearance and the voice.
Izvestiya
WOE FROM WIT / Alexander Griboyedov
Perm Academic Theatre
Perm,
Russia 2011
Stage director, set designer – Philipp Grigorian
Costume designer – Galya Solodovnikova
Choreographer – Sergey Zemlyanskiy
Dramaturg – Eduard Boyakov
The comedy is played in the underground parking lot, the characters wear ultra-modern clothes, everybody uses cell phones. Expensive cars gather in front of the ballroom, and the infamous Famusov society gossips about Chatzky in the Internet.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
The spectators of the play do not watch the clock, and the two-act structure "reads" surprisingly easily, and its two-century old legend is believed quite readily. The title of one of the most promising young directors, given to Philipp Grigorian, as it seemed, too hasty and in advance, however, is not deceiving at all. So his carriage, his carriage - let him rush straight to his recognition.
Business Class
UNCLE'S DREAM / Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Perm Academic Theatre
Perm,
Russia 2010
Milgram, Boyakov and Grigorian have turned early Dostoevsky's light vaudevillian tale into a complex, juicy production in the spirit of Matthew Barney's Cremaster. The authors of Uncle's Dream contrasted the linear logic of the story with the logic of the dream.
Snob
Stage director – Boris Milgram
Set designer – Philipp Grigorian
Costume designer – Galya Solodovnikova
Choreographer – Anna Abalikhina
Dramaturg – Eduard Boyakov
CHUCCAS / Pavel Pryazhko
Perm Academic Theatre
Perm,
Russia 2009
Stage director, set designer – Philipp Grigorian
Costume designer – Galya Solodovnikova
Choreographer – Sergey Zemlyanskiy
Philip Grigorian's The Chuccas is a suffocating, exhausting production, after which it seems impossible not only to speak but also to feel, to breathe. "Chukchi", metaphorically speaking, physically violates our habitual perception of the world, destroys all cultural clichés.
Snob
The episode where Masha walks along the backdrop to Didon's aria from Purcell's opera, and the "cheburashka" on the plume of her dress with cake in his hands, is so beautiful in itself that even if it were not tied to the action as a whole, it could be perceived as a separate piece of high art.
Afisha
