Memoria

The production is part of Dialogue (im)possible – special Festival section which is an attempt to connect with Russian and Belarusian artists who had to leave their countries due to censorship and the threat of persecution and confront their national, cultural and linguistic identity with a new environment. Or those who had to stay in their country for various reasons and create unofficially.

Originally, Nana Grinstein’s play wasn’t entitled Memoria but Carola Neher. The Pantyhose Role. Its first performance was held as stage reading at the Moscow Museum of the History of the Gulag in cooperation with the International Memorial. The museum has since been closed (as of November 2024 when the authorities “discovered” faults in fire safety measures). And Memorial? It does not exist at all. The non-governmental, non-profit human rights organisation that has been methodically investigating and documenting the crimes of Stalinism since 1987 was dissolved by Russian courts in 2021 for violating the law on foreign agents. A year later, after the launch of the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine and the forced exile of the director Anastasia Patlay, the production of Memoria could no longer be completed in Moscow. Still, the fate of the German actress Carola Neher, an emancipated lady and intellectual, star of the 1920s Berlin theatre and the first to be cast as of Polly Peachum in The Threepenny Opera by Brecht, however, managed to come out to the spotlight.

When Hitler came to power in Germany, Neher emigrated to the Soviet Union. She ended up in the gulag and her young son Georg was placed in a Soviet orphanage. They never met again – Neher died in prison in 1942 of typhoid, and Georg only learned who she really was in 1975. Anastasia Patlay, who currently resides in Augsburg, managed to stage a production of stories of Carola Neher’s and Irina Shcherbakova, founder of the Memorial. The work, like memory, layers the stories of the 20th century, the fates of German artists, Soviet prisoners and Russian human rights activists, memories, facts and their revisions, repetitions of mistakes and actions that we thought would never happen again. Memoria is a unique work, anchored in deep wisdom, courage and determination of the production team to speak about the truth. Instead of the plain and straightforward language of documentary theatre, it is narrated by innovative stage expansion of the semantic field and the audience’s walk through, with the power of scenic imagination and expressive diversity, extraordinary artistic language and by revealing the connections between the past and the present.