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Yeheskel Lazarov – On the adaptation and staging of two
novels by Oscar Wilde and Ivan Turgenev

Rivka Ayalon

Yeheskel Lazarov is a multi-disciplinary artist; It seems there is no
medium in which he didn't excel: Writing, directing, stage design,
choreography, video directing, and of course – acting and dancing. Even
the types of works he chooses to direct are varied: He does not confine
himself to direct plays, but also adapts novels for the stage.
Lazarov chose two novels that have stirred up quite a havoc when
published, and preserved their historical background. Victorian England,
that conceals decadence under its puritan laws, and Russia with the
struggle between the thinkers of the 1840s, and the "new people" who
belonged to the lower middle class of the 1860s.
The preservation of the historical character didn't prevent the director from
creating two new pieces of art that maintain their timelessness by being
synesthetic, addressing all the senses. Lazarov staged The Picture of Dorian
Gray as a rock musical, the dances and songs of which (Pink Floyd, David
Boie, The Cure, Metallica, etc.) are merged into it to such a degree that they
become part of the atmosphere and life-style of the young, who experience a
"low-profile" revolt without authentic choice. The director chose to open the
show with an event that takes place at the end of novel (stabbing the picture
and Dorian's death), and to end it with an encounter from its beginning (the
young Dorian sitting before the painter and "mentor", Henry Wotton, and
wishes to be endowed with eternal beauty). By chronologically turning the
play upside down the director tried to "linger" in the period of youth, and
explore its role in Dorian's development.
In the production of Fathers and Sons Lazarov operates two cameras, an
upper and a frontal one, thus creating two differently looking events. The
frontal camera presents us with an almost empty and somber stage, and
the characters walk on it slowly, dressed in black (in contrast to the
dynamic and light movement in Wilde's show). Here the staging is
symbolist, alluding from the start to the march towards death – the death
of Bazarov, and probably also to a spiritual decline to which the nihilism
that threatens to dominate our lives will, as he sees it, might lead. On the
other hand, the upper camera enable us to detect a simpler life, and the
pictures that it conveys reflect normality, life in nature and falling in love.
Both shows create an aesthetic world that distills the reality described in
the novels of the two writers. Wilde and Turgenev were aesthetes, and the
shows that Lazarov produced from their works, are in themselves
aesthetic masterpieces,

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