In the Solitude of Cotton Fields

Dailes Theatre | Timofey Kulyabin

The story of a secret encounter between two people. They are strangers, but one has something that the other needs. For a deal to happen, one of them needs to find a way to say what it is they need. They need to find words and to find language that is incomprehensible to others, but meaningful to them - specific and direct. There is palpable desire between them. But still there is a fear of confessing to desire, the fear of becoming vulnerable. Fear of the stranger. Bernard-Marie Koltès’ play is performed by theatre and cinema stars John Malkovich and Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė.

Run time 60 minutes
Genre theatre
Language English
Surtitles Dutch

In the Solitude of Cotton Fields

The famous play by Bernard-Marie Koltès was written in 1985, four years before the playwright died from AIDS. Within it the French theatre researcher Patrice Pavis finds references to the philosophical dialogues of Plato and Diderot, and Koltès himself calls it "a philosophical dialogue in the manner of the seventeenth century". The action takes place "on the other side of time" - in the dark hours of the night, when a “seller” and a “buyer” meet and become entangled in a dangerous game of buying and selling, in which fear, desire, sexuality, repressed guilt and aggression rule.
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The object of the "deal" remains vague and unnamed. Some painful secret is kept, which not only cannot be spoken but also cannot be humbled by the inner measure of right and wrong, of good and evil. The dialogue resembles a dramatized monologue of consecutive presentation of philosophical theses; lines and arguments are exchanged according to the rules of a treatise on logic or law.

Timofey Kulyabin about In the Solitude of Cotton Fields

"Our show is about sexual perversion, about a hidden desire, which is punishable by many of our contemporary societies. There are two actors in our show, but not two characters. We are in the subconscious, in someone's nightmare, and he is not physically on the stage. He lives in terrible internal disharmony because he has realised that his sexual desire is criminal. But that's his nature and he can't fight it. He wants to admit it to himself, but he can't, because it is both scary and dangerous. We are in a man who endlessly struggles with himself. It is a projection of his consciousness, a nightmare in which he is constantly trying to come to terms with himself."

CREDITS

cast Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė and John Malkovich

director Timofey Kulyabin
set and costume designer Oleg Golovko
dramaturg Roman Dolzhansky
video designer Alexander Lobanov
sound designer Timofei Pastukhov
lighting designer Oskars Paulins
choreographer Anna Abalikhina
head of video production Anastasia Zhuravleva
head of photography Vladimir Burtsev
executive producer and administrative director Irina Paradnaya
line producer Yaroslava Ziva-Chernova
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production assistant Elias Kuznetsov
production manager Siarhei Rylko
sound desk Filippos Karetsos
light desk Alexandros Ioannis Hills
media-server operator Anton Rоdionov
video production operator Andrei Mytnik
video operators Frol Podlesniy, Pavel Minarskiy and Alexander Razuvalov
stage manager Kseniya Vinichenko

co-producers Dailes Teatris Latvia and Ekaterina Yakimova
sSupported by BLAVATNIK FAMILY FOUNDATION
presented by Bormio SIA and Flow Projects GmbH
supported by Ammodo