There is a phrase that sounds in the play “Viy” by Kirill Serebrennikov and causes goosebumps. In the monologue, one of the characters talks about how a person gradually gets used to the devastation, madness and horror of war, dismembered bodies and heaps of the dead. You learn to “love” war, he says, and the word “love” carries a negative charge. You learn in the unknown, he means. Paranoia, desperation, terror, propaganda and the agony of war condense in Serebrennikov’s performance, which opened the events of Piraeus 260 on Wednesday, the symbolic move of the Athens Festival.

A well-known Russian director – persecuted in his homeland, living in Germany – has created an anti-war show on the occasion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which takes the viewer, breathlessly, with a compressed stomach, from the light Mediterranean summer to the inexorable reality of the war that continues in our area. Combining realistic and supernatural elements, Serebrennikov recreates real-life tales of prisoners being led to execution, dead people coming to life to read Shakespeare, mothers trying to identify their sons’ corpses, puppet soldiers, promises of a better life with cars, washing machines. and macbooks after the “liberation” campaign. In the semi-darkness of the room where the action takes place, something between a prison cell and an orphanage is never penetrated by a crack of light and optimism. Only “Viy” dances and sings, a strange creature that arose from the imagination of Nikolai Gogol and kills anyone who looks at him, the war itself.