The cult play from the Maly Teatr of Saint Petersburg which consecrated Lev Dodin on the world’s stages.Gaudeamus debuted in 1990, the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, while the winds of Perestroika blew through Eastern Europe. Today it returns to the stage in a completely renovated version, beginning with the cast, composed of actors from the Maly and recently graduated students from the Theatrical Academy of Saint Petersburg, where Dodin is the director of the Department of Acting.
The protagonist of Gaudeamus (the title refers to the famous Medieval commercium song) is a small military contingent. Through a series of scenes both poetic and violent, delicate and devastating, Dodin originally sought to describe the senselessness of military life – and war – the violence exercised by the system on the individual, and the cruelty of life as a whole.

Today, 25 years on from its debut, the play has been restaged with young actors “some of whom were not even born – explains Dodin – or were just born when the play was first staged. They have just graduated from the Academy, they never directly knew the Soviet Union or Perestroika, and they have a different collective vision from those who played their roles before them. Gaudeamus is a play which speaks of being human, of human beings, of the relationships which bind them to each other, of their way of relating to the system, whatever it is, right or wrong. Thus this new version of my play moves towards a lack of meaning for life in a timeless and universal sense, so that some moments, if we wish, take on a still crueller realism and violence: that which is presented on stage is the circus of life”.