"We live in a country without feeling the country ...". If the hero of the play of Roman Viktyuk becomes a creator, it is always a creator, cast out by the authorities, and never the creator walking in the general column. Turning in a new play to the tragic fate of one of the brightest Russian poets, Osip Mandelstam, the director creates no accusation of the state system-he writes a requiem to the departed poets. To all those who sacrificed themselves to their own cruel museum, which does not allow them not to create. To all those who, when leaving, firmly knew that they would remain in eternity. Those who found in this knowledge - salvation.

"Mandelstam" is the first production in Russia of the eponymous drama play by Don Nigro, a controversial and incredibly interesting figure. Being in love with Russian literature, having written many plays about great writers and poets, comprehending various periods of Russian history through their destinies - he has never been to Russia. His heroes were Pushkin and Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva. The play "Mandelstam" is a work of art based on the documentary facts of the life of the poet Osip Mandelstam and the trial of him. To his tragic biography in the domestic theater, almost no one addressed Roman Viktuk, although in his fate, as in an extremely truthful mirror, reflected all the cruel and terrible realities of the time when he lived and worked. Time, when under the wheels of the machine of destruction, which became a totalitarian system, the best perished.

Roman Viktyuk created a scenically laconic and multi-layered and polysemantic statement about the fate of the great poet, about the eternal confrontation between the Artist and the authorities - and that genuinely ingenious works are not subject to time or human will. They were and will remain - in eternity, like their creators.