Marina Shimadina, Troud:

In his stagings Eimuntas Nekrošius never gives ready-made answers. He sets the audience to thinking and feeling as intensely as the actors onstage. And it takes no theater glasses to see what titanic effort the actors are called to apply in the virtual absence of visual effects. In the end of the show Yevgeny Mironov is lugging big rocks up and down the stage (a favorite element of Nekrošius' set design), but one has the feeling he has been doing this throughout the four hours that the play runs. His character is not a tyrant, not the devil incarnate or an insane neurotic. And his stern look from under his brows that one can see on the playbills does not really reflect the the scenic image Mironov creates. This Caligula is a stranger to affectation. He speaks softly, and in the beginning looks like a confused boy. More than anyone else he is torturing himself. He is the Hamlet of the times of Nero and Seneca, doomed to take vengeance on everyone, people and gods, for the existing ways of this world.

Alyona Karas, Rossiiskaya gazeta:

The performance rotates around four couples: Caligula/Caesonia (Maria Mironova's performance is a curious combination of parody, grotesque, tragedy and melodrama); Caligula/Scipio (Yevgeny Tkachouk plays a gentle young poet in love with Caligula to the extent of forgiving him the murder of his father); Caligula/Cherea (a fearless dissident performed by Aleksei Devotchenko), and finally Caligula and faithful Helicon. ... Mironov's ... invariably pale face (no wonder that he is striving to get himself the Moon) is a clear sign of the passions that are scorching him from within. His aphorisms are products of agonizing pain:"To rule means to steal. I want to steal openly". But the play is not confined essentially to these maxima. There's the odd horror in the eyes of Caesonia and Scipio, both in love with Caligula; Caligula's frozen pale face and the nervous movements of his hands; the nearly obliterated bar of soap, and the cord strung from one wing to the other on the very edge of the stage. Touched for the last time, it rings with the tension that we ourselves feel in the absence of catharsis or hope.

Yelena Dyakova, Novaya gazeta:

This Caligula is not so much the flickering image of 20th-century tyrants as the distant shadow of Hamlet and Paul I. As he humiliates and jeers at the others, with childish enthusiasm entraps and entices the fathers and sons of the people he executed, and mocks the gods, one has the feeling that he is torturing his victims in a desperate effort to extract whatever godly is left in them. Possessed by a freedom akin to St. Vitus's dance, he transgresses all thinkable limits and finally throws himself upon the avenging sword. Like some monstrous Diogenes he longs for someone to destroy him for his sins, of which in Nekrošius' interpretation he is only too well aware.

Mariya Khalizeva, Ekran i stzena:

The pathetic bunch of patricians that have resolved to break off from the fence resemble a pack of dogs. But the only pet destined for the doghouse is the Emperor's lover Caesonia. Out of love for the Emperor she has steam-ironed out of herself all sense of compassion [...] and developed the habit of chatting easily about executions and tortures. As Caesonia, stylish beauty and talented actress Maria Mironova gradually loses her luster. Her gait gets increasingly fidgety and puppetlike. As she runs across the stage she produces the cries of a seagull. Above all, she seems to be getting shorter as day after day she is compelled to listen to a madman's speeches in justification of his doings. [...]

One of the most expressive and image-laden scenes in Caligula is the contest of poets who by the will of the tyrant must improvise on the theme of death. The poets appear, each carrying under his arm a pair of paper legs dressed in black socks. Presently the contest develops into a degrading show of shaking and breaking limbs, and as soon as the judge gives a whistle they go promptly into the garbage heap.

Yevgeny Mironov plays Caligula as "a martyr to delusion", dreaming of the moon and depressed by a lust that cannot be satisfied. A latter-day rival to Heaven, he, like Ibsen's Brandt, declares: "Everything or nothing!" ... Yevgeny Mironov's Caligula calls up Mikhail Chekhov in the Vakhtangov Theater's production of Eric XIV – the fantastic fluctuations from anger to lyricism and gentleness in the demeanor of that other ruler from a different land and age. [...]

As he rushes toward his death with the famous exclamation "Into history, Caligula! Into history!", Yevgeny Mironov's character doesn't smash the mirror as is written in the play. The fragments of the mirror are already there – those that were put in his bosom in the very beginning and those that the rebels are armed with. The crowd bares them to assassinate Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, also known as Caligula. It brings to an end the bloody "staging" of an experiment in self-destruction performed to the music of Wagner, Brukner, Handel and Strauss (one may recall in this connection Nekrošius' recent works in opera theaters around the world).

Those who expected Eimuntas Nekrošius to come up with a theatrical reflection about the current regime will be disappointed. The regime is the least of his concerns. In Caligula he remains true to himself: the scope of his interests is still metaphysics and anthropology. His Caligula is not so much a merciless ruler as a man on the brink.

Nataliya Kaminskaya, Kultura:

Mironova's performance is very stylish, at times almost grotesque, but there is something distressingly human in it which produces an unwanted lump in the throat. Brimming with emotion, too (which is very atypical for an existentialist drama [...]) is Scipio, possessed by a tragic romantic love that is bigger than leaden reality and everyday relations. And Caligula's watchdog Helicon (Igor Gordin), half idiot, half saint, is determined to stay with his master to the end, if only because he ranks loyalty above betrayal and despises the patricians in Caligula's retinue for their utter lack of talent. ...

Mironov plays a martyr to an idea. He has no pity for himself or for the others. He cares for nothing except the absolute beauty which he cannot reach just as he cannot reach the moon.

"Too many dead", he says. And he kills his wife Caesonia almost tenderly as he puts his head on her throat and she suffocates in this last act of love. Meanwhile the "too many dead" keep walking around onstage along with those who haven't been killed yet. For in the world fantasized or created by Caligula the borderline between life and death has been erased. The ghost of his sister Drusilla (Yelena Gorina), a red-haired elf come from Nekrošius' previous stagings, scalds her bare feet as they touch the "burning" ground. And when Caligula touches the cord strung along the footlights, it breaks with a mystical echo.

Marina Tokareva, openspace.ru:

Mironov's soft face lets the evil in quite imperceptibly. His Caligula is not a monster. It's his standards that are monstrous. His rebellion is furiously quiet. As he throws up spite, takes a scientist's interest in deadly experiments or or is comically absorbed in self-admiration, he never forgets the main question formulated by Camus in the very beginning: "Is life worth living?"

...As they stand in a circle deftly throwing and catching invisible objects, Scipio, Caesonia and Caligula are lit by a gleam of the salad days they shared. They call him Kai; they grew up together. And when the patricians are putting mirror shards in the Emperor's bosom one can't help recalling Hans Christian Andersen's Kai, whose soul and sight were damaged by a fragment of a broken mirror.

Olga Fuchs, Vechernyaya Moskva:

"Freedom becomes pain and pain liberates" – this formula of Jean-Paul Sartre's is the key to Yevgeny Mironov's performance in the role of a bloodthirsty dictator with a sensitive soul, a hunger for the ultimate freedom – from gods' will, his own fate and the universal predestination that all men must die – and a yearning for the unattainable ("I want the moon").

On the surface is a foam of in-your-face relevance: the power-that-be that has gone so far in its crimes that no retreat is possible. The "political economy" of this power is as simple as this: "To rule means to steal. Everybody knows this. So I shall steal openly". Caligula's gaze, now leaden, now transparent, is only too recognizable. But Mironov digs deeper to raise the "damned" existentialist question: is life worth living? Especially as the world is so disgustingly imperfect. He inoculates himself with cruelty as a scientist does with plague. Collecting taxes from his subjects in the form of glass fragments, he puts the pieces in his bosom and cries out: from now on he will have to live with the sharp pain – until his liberation comes in the guise of faceless patricians hiding behind mirror shards.

Camus's Caligula croaks to the murdering patricians: "I'm still alive!" Nekrošius' Caligula, with a relieved cry of "Into history!", throws himself into the glass abyss, taking advantage of the only freedom available to man – the freedom to "return the ticket to Heaven".

Vladimir Kolyazin, Planeta Krasota:

The complex language of Caligula is harshly out of tune with both the language of the modern theater and the usual yardsticks of Nekrošius himself. In Caligula Nekrošius is both familiar and unfamiliar. The stylistic cryptogram of Nekrošius, renowned for his ability to fully translate words and thoughts into body language, is like entering Wonderland. The geometric quality of this language, combined with the powerful dynamics of the mise-en-scènes that changes from a whirlwind to the breath of Eros, make theater historians recall the constructivist impulses of Tairov and the pen strokes of Exter's costumes. Nekrošius' biomechanics is second to none: the actors' gesticulation is strange and erratic, its perfect imperfection compelling to compete. It gives one the feeling of leeches applied to the body. It seems to appeal: learn to read and hurry to live. According to Nekrošius, a gesture is a thing in itself. One suspects that the director is striving to create his own gestus, as that term was used by experimenter Berthold Brecht: to designate his theory of regenerating the gesture for the sake of sharpening its meaning – to the extent where it becomes a cut that produces purifying bleeding.

Liubov Lebedeva, Tribuna:

Nekrošius needed this very long play, these four hours of real time, to retrace how a healthy man loses his health, how the carbon dioxide of disgust fills his lungs and causes suffocation. More often than not amnesia is a tricky thing: nothing can restore a man's memory of the past, there is no way back or forward, only a dead end. Even Caesonia, brilliantly played by Maria Mironova, cannot help Caligula return to the righteous path, for her beloved has a much more attractive "girlfriend" named Death with whom it's so much fun to play blind man's buff. Next to this monster, Caesonia turns into a "sister of mercy" by and by, servicing the endless conveyor of victims with brief cigarette breaks. And this is human tragedy rather than a myth.

Zhanna Zaretskaya, fontanka.ru:

It is precisely the magic of Caligula's personality, the charisma of the true artist, that make his retinue hesitate so long before resolving to take part in the conspiracy. Until the very end, only two characters, not counting Helicon – the Emperor's beloved Caesonia and his old friend Scipio – will not yield to the animal fear of death that turns the high-ranking Romans first into "the people who are silent" and then into murderers. Maria Mironova portrays the limitless self-sacrificing love of a woman who gradually changes from a flourishing hetaera to a half-mad vestal virgin with disheveled hair and dark circles under her eyes, betraying many sleepless nights of vigil. Her feelings are best expressed in the angry phrase that she spits in the senators' faces: "Like all soulless people, you can't stand a man who has soul in abundance". Only Scipio seems to understand her. Yevgeny Tkachouk plays him as a refined young poet who walks a long and torturous road to understanding Caligula and forgiving his father's murder, forgiving not the Caesar but a friend. The quiet dialogue of Caligula and Scipio is one of the most powerful scenes in the staging. It is the first instance where the armor of inhuman logic is punctured by the sincerity of human emotion.

Nataliya Vitvitzkaya, Vash dosug:

From the very first seconds of the show director Eimuntas Nekrošius throws the audience into a vortex of traditional existentialist metaphors and gut-punching images. What we see is a populous Roman court ruled consecutively by a joyful boy, an embittered brother of a dead girl, and finally a murderous tyrant. The transformation, or rather degeneration, of Mironov' Caligula takes place against the background of a triumphal arch, a doghouse and a couple of thrones, all made of corrugated roofing. The imperial forums are likened to heaps of contruction debris that Caligula's courtiers lug on their shoulders much of the time. Something is always happening onstage. While Caligula barks out cruel truths about all men being guilty and unhappy, his retinue is laundering, ironing, constructing and transporting. This picture typifies all empires and civilizations – ceaseless bustle against the background of eternal power.

Yelena Levinskaya, Teatralnaya afisha:

Director Eimuntas Nekrošius has his own way of resolving the conflict in Camus's play. His Caligula as played by Yevgeny Mironov is not a greenhorn whose delirious hubris makes him want the moon. He does crave the moon, but in a different way. Yevgeny Mironov portrays the torment of having power. A ruler is doomed to burn out everything human in him because to be human means to need warmth, love, peace of mind – thus to be dependent. A ruler must break off all connections of the heart. And therefore, with intentional cruelty, Caligula kills the father of his friend and beloved poet Scipio (excellent work of actor Yevgeny Tkachouk), surrounds himself with a pack of nonentities who clutch at the throne, encourages a "pocket" opposition (conspirator Cherea is played by Aleksei Devotchenko with spite and subtlety). But all that is forbidden – tenderness, sensitivity, memories – relentlessly haunts Caligula in the image of a barefoot Drusilla. She flutters birdlike amidst the grey slate that symbolizes the abode of power, tough-looking stuff that crumbles from a good stone throw. This forbidden fruit is the "moon" for which the Caesar's soul yearns quite against his will.


[Edited by Vlada Chernomordik for the Yevgeny Mironov Official Website]