Bloody Mary
Special project
Play and staging by: Dmitry Krymov
Based on motifs from F. Schiller's play "Mary Stuart"
Set and costume design: Katya Erdeni
Dramaturgy: Katya Sosonska
Music editing and sound: Mikhail Vaisburd
Lighting: Gleb Filishtinsky
Assistant director: Katerina Viziteya
Cast
First grandmother / Queen Elizabeth: Israil (Sasha) Demidov
Second grandmother / Mary Stuart: Yevgenia Dolina
Nurse: Polina Pakhomova
Cyclist / assistant director: Nikita Goldman
The one pierced by a sword: Nikita Oleinikov
First grandmother's granddaughter: Rute Senderovich
Second grandmother's grandson: Itai Tarkhanov
Diver / prompter: Boris Repetur
Make-up artists and dressers: Polina Pakhomova, Nikita Oleinikov, Rute Senderovich, Itai Tarkhanov
"The throne of England is defiled by a bastard!
By a sly deceiver has been fooled
That noble people! By all justice
You should lie here before me in the dust,
For I, I am your true queen!*"
- •Translated by J. Pliekšāns (Rainis).
In the trauma unit, people from different worlds and eras meet. Among them are two actresses preparing to play "Mary Stuart." Their conversations gradually turn into the play itself, and the ancient story of power, jealousy, and execution begins to happen here and now. When it ends in death, life goes on, and everything returns to its place to begin again.
Dmitry Krymov's "Bloody Mary" is neither a staging of Schiller's play nor an illustration of it. It is a new world, the world of an artist, built from fragments of the bloody plot, from our visible and invisible memories of it, and from the realities of today, where "Mary Stuart" becomes an excuse for a serious, contemporary conversation.
The invented characters of the performance - grotesque, almost circus performers, symbolic figures - become flesh and blood before our eyes. The mask cracks, clowning turns into confession, and the image into a living body. In this theater, the comic is always close to the tragic, and play becomes a form of existence and a way to tell the story of our tangled lives.
Dmitry Krymov is one of the most influential directors of his generation, a stage magician who mercilessly shatters any dogma to pieces. His theater lives by the laws written by imagination and play - a dangerous, utterly absurd play, behind whose curtain life itself always stands. Here, fantasy reveals reality in order to express its secret and hidden meanings.
Premiere - June 21, 2026.
Running time - 1 hour 30 minutes without an intermission.
The performance is in Russian with Latvian and English subtitles.
The performance contains explicit language.
Guest performances by Gešer Theatre are held within the framework of the cultural cooperation program between Latvia and Israel. The guest performances are supported by the Uniting Foundation and the Future Support Foundation, the charitable foundation of Rietumu Banka.
