Created using themes and personnages from paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (The Beekeepers, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Battle about Money, and The Triumph of Death) as well as from Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools, the performance also makes uses of music by G. Handel, W.A. Mozart, F. Chopin, and C. Saint-Saëns.

The first performance created by Nikolai Roschin, Beekeepers brought the director fame and a whole series of awards with its bewitching fantasy, plunging into the mystic world of Middle Age painting.  Five separate stories are united through Bruegel’s beekeepers (personnages from his peasant scene of the same name), whom every hero of the play encounters on the threshold of his spiritual death.  This strange and captivating production, spiced with light irony, demonstrates how easy it is to renounce words in order to convey highly complicated feelings.  Tragedy and farce, clownery and realism collide with one another in one space at the same time, in an attempt to create a new theatrical language.

Beekeepers opened the programmes of numerous European festivals to great success, including: UNIDRAM ’98 (Germany), HOMO NOVUS ’99 (Latvia), BALTOSCANDAL ’99 (Estonia), SOLNTSEVOROT ‘00 (St. Petersburg), Moscow on the Stage ’02 (Paris), Passages ’03 (Nancy, France) and MIMOS ’03 (Périgueux, France).  It is also a laureate of the awards festival Moscow Debuts ‘98 in the category of Best Directorial Debut.

The premiere was held on 2/02/2007
Performance duration: 1 h.

Staged by:
Direction and Scene Design — Nikolai Roshchin
Musical Arrangement —  Ivan Volkov.

Performed by:
Alexander Komissarov, Natalia Voloshina, Yulia Shimolina, Sergey Pechenkin, Sergei Savitsky, Oleg Gerasimov, Ivan Volkov, Ivan Makhovikov, Andrei Krylov, Olesya Yakovleva, Natalia Pozdnyakova, Mikhail Gorsky.