John Malkovich gave an interview on the stage of the House of Literature and Arts after the play “In the solitude of the cotton fields” and simply stated the following truth: “The theater, when it is good, is redemption and healing. When it’s bad, then it’s torture…”

The work of Bernard-Marie Colt could be a painful experience for the viewer because of the long parallel monologues of a seller who does not want to satisfy the lust of the buyer, and a buyer who desperately resists the lust of the market. “The loneliness of the cotton plains” is the loneliness of desperate sellers and buyers in a non-existent deal.

Poetic dialogic figures belong to the form of a philosophical essay on enlightenment. The apparent lack of logical coherence, combined with the spontaneous expression of death wishes and fears, constitutes verbal dixifism, with the clear influence of correct discourse and the Cartesian notion of argument reconstruction. Dramaturgy of this kind is clearly addressed to a special audience familiar with the codes of the philosophical view of the theater, expressed in the works of Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett.

Timofey Kulyabin from Russia wins points where the drama loses. He focuses directly and unconditionally on the essence of the play and directs two actors, John Malkovich and Ingeborga Dapkunaite, as one character.

High-tech cameras continuously capture every detail (video design by Alexander Lobanov), gradually revealing what lies behind their words and evasions: an old pedophilia case. The viewer recognizes in the expressions on the faces of a barefoot couple, dressed in the same costume, all the despair and longing caused by the fatal clash of two gladiators.

Malkovich and Dapkunaite alternate in two and unique roles of the work and fully feel the difference between the performance that is filmed and the performance experienced theatrically: “In the cinema, you turn to the camera that records you, and in the theater you turn even to the viewer of the last episode “.

The dramaturgy of the genre is addressed to the viewer, who is familiar with the codes of the philosophical view of the theater, expressed in the works of Genet and Beckett.

The action begins as a cinematic experience, turns into a theatrical one, and develops into a hypothetical ring as it is organized on the basis of a verbal attack and defense between two sides of the same character: the dealer and the customer. In the beginning, we watch a cutscene of the arrival of a man with a bag and dressed as a dealer, and the opening scene suggests, perhaps, a respite before attempting suicide. There is no plot, Oleg Golovko’s decoration, visually abstract, erases the round shape as a space, as it defines a room with a shower at the beginning and at the end of the theatrical experience.

The minimalist scenographic concept is based on the practical function of signs and is embellished with stage objects interleaved in a frame of a semiologically functional space. The Lego-shaped Eiffel Tower against the backdrop of a snow-covered landscape, a hanger with many symbolic zones, and children’s drawings in a painting brightly lit by Oscar Paulins stand out.

There is no stage space and time in Koltes’ existential universe, only successive verbal ambiguities and tensions that escalate when two people realize they are not making a deal. The seller confronts the buyer and the seller confronts the buyer.

Malkovich, as an actor who transformed the strict “method” technique of American theater schools, also internalized his technique to follow the personality of the actor rather than the character. In a role where a character is completely absent, it’s natural for him to stand out. Together with Dapkunaite, they conveyed the heroes both as individuals and as abstract concepts, moving to the level of both a realistic role and its poetic decomposition. They alternate between the two roles and sometimes stubbornly and desperately resist a threatening dealer, sometimes a defensive buyer, and vice versa…

In Coltes, the dramatic figures speak as if exhaling air, as if performing pirouettes in a verbal vacuum. They float with the viewer in a fluid, misty landscape and hesitate whether they really exist in theatrical conditions or whether they are in a nightmare of a third person who will never appear on stage.