Two ordinary guys guard the grandiose construction of a palace that they are not allowed to look at. They joke, share their secrets, dream about the future, until a mad emperor orders to chop off of the hands of 20,000 builders...
In 2016, Rajiv Joseph's tragicomedy The Guards at the Taj was named The Best American Play by the Off-Broadway Obie Award.
What if the plot about the secret palace construction had been told in the spirit of Tarantino? Chthonic aesthetics, witty humor, the bloody and the terrible, the philosophical and the beautiful are woven together in the conversations of Humayun and Babur.
This is a story of those who follow orders. What to choose when 40,000 severed hands are on one side of the scale and your head is on the other?
Along with Babur and Humayun, the hands are the protagonists of the play, and with their help conversations are formed, birds fly, and stars light up.
"The Guards at the Taj" invites a tour not into a luxurious palace, but inside yourself - a tour that is honest and uncompromising.
Duration: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Director: Anna Demidova
Choreographer: Lyuda Burysheva
Costume Designer: Svetlana Podbirilova
Lighting Designer: Antonina Lebedeva
Music: Shurochka Chernokrylov, Askhat Sukhanberdin, Valentin Kovanovsky, Pavel Lapukhin
Sound engineer: Anton Rozov