«Happy Beggars» by Carlo Gozzi

Script and direction by Mark Weil

According to results of the critic's and spectator's opinion poll at the «Theatre: East - West» International Theatre Festival (Tashkent, October 1993), Happy Beggars was acknowledged as the best performance of the festival.

The performance was first shown in May 1992. It is a fantasy on C. Gozzi's play set in Samarkand where traditional characters of Italian comedia dell'arte turned into real personalities, acquired real background, nationalities and variety of languages. Samarkand in M. Weil' s performance as well as in Gozzi's play is Babylon where Asian and European cultures, different understanding of life, society and human values all mix together. The characters of the performance make friends, fall in love, sometimes they quarrel and even fight with each other but the at the same time they cannot exist without each other. The show reflects Ilkhom's attitude to our life and the latest developments of our history the way it should be in comedia dell'arte, the art of improvisation. But the performance is not only an allusion to the reality, it is a sparkling show playing by actors who are hardly over twenty. Their final appeal to the audience is both light and sad at the same time, «Poor, hungry people! Bread has turned into the show for you today. So I only beg you, pray fervently to the gods. May they send wisdom, justice, peace and happiness to the people of this poor country whom we love as our own children.»

«For a long time already, Ilkhom represents and islet, and oasis of high cosmopolitism, desisting from national cultural-political games, staying «above the fight», conforming in no way to the changing conditions of existence. It retains its audience - multilingual, of varying ages, polysocial. But officially its position in the theatre structure of Uzbekistan has suffered and shifted to the very fringe - to the zone off off. The very actors of the troupe may be dubbed Happy Beggars independent, existing happily and obsessively in their place, but cast out by the system, not taking into consideration.

In the First Act when we see the inside of the meshed space, equipped with the same meshed sliding doors, the black trestle-beds put up on which restless personages sit like refugees, it is clear what this it - the banal space of a railway station building. Here they sleep, eat from the paper-bag, shave, fluffing up soup-suds in plastic glasses, wait for something, quarrel, arrive, depart. Here relationships are entered into and severed. Here, in pure Russian, but also in Asiatic traveling habit (and by the rules of the Carnival as well with its fervid freedom of intercourse) they relate to each other the most incredible and most candid stories of their lives. Their railway station in the Happy Beggars is the basic place of the action… The railway station is the contemporary substitute for the Square, an image of a world where everything moved and shifted from its customary place. And the First Act of Happy Beggars is the chaos of the created anew Universe.

A special role in the element of acting is assigned to play on language. It proceeds in four languages - Russian, Uzbek, Hebrew and Italian… The actors not only switch easily from language to language, but communicate wonderfully, speaking in different languages or not even speaking at all.

Photos from the production  «Happy Beggars» by Carlo Gozzi (photos by Timur Karpov, September 2007)

The Premiere of the production 29.05.1992
Duration of the performance 2 h 50 m.

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