The Marriage of Anatoly Efros

The legendary performance "The Marriage", staged by Anatoly Efros in 1975 at the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya, is a recognized masterpiece of theatrical art of the second half of the 20th century. The author offers to trace the history of the performance's creation: from the emergence of the idea through rehearsals to the premiere, to understand how it was done, but more importantly, why it was done.

This book is about the discovery of new theatrical meanings in Gogol's well-known play, about the directorial interpretation that made this performance a cultural phenomenon, inseparable from the social and aesthetic context of its time. The central part of the research is a reconstruction of the performance, restored from various materials: the director's copy, reviews, music, photographs, rehearsal snippets, diary entries of the director, and notes in the margins of the play. Using documents and theatrical analysis, the book recreates the image of the performance from fragments, which reassemble in the reader's imagination into an artistic whole.