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The Ministry of Culture and Tourism continues to introduce Bakuvians to the achievements of this country's theatrical troupes. It has made it possible for a troupe from a drama theatre in Lankaran to appear on the stage of the State Theatre of Young Spectators. They performed a Tural Mustafayev play based on Eduardo De Filippo's "These Ghosts". Mustafa Mustafayev was the production designer.

Souls

The performance began with a man with glasses on and a plaid over his shoulders walking through rows of viewers seated in the hall, saying greetings and seating himself at a table opposite the footlights. Later on, we learn that it is Prof Santana (Naftulla Ajdarov). The playwright portrayed him as a useful soul that does not appear on stage. The director portrayed him as a physically acting character. He enters into a dialogue with Pasquale, actively interferes in the action, giving advice to Pasquale's wife Maria about how she should act in a critical moment of action. But that's just in the beginning. Afterwards, he disappears from the audience's field of view, staying seated at the table by the footlights. But for some time it will be him that the protagonist of this story, Pasquale Lojacono (Abulfas Axundov), will confide his thoughts to. The author of the production sees this character as a suffering soul. However, the playwright, who wrote the play in 1946, gave each character a comprehensive description at the level of type definitions -mournful soul, cursed soul, black soul, restless soul, useless souls, etc. Definitions of this kind were meant to help both director and actors to create typical characters, determine their behavioural style and establish relationships at the level of subtext, enabling them to display them in the structure of the main conflict. It is not by chance that the playwright depicted Pasquale as a suffering soul. This naive and gullible person, who is not adapted to life, truly suffers because he is not capable of fitting into the real life of society in crisis.

About the plot of the play

The naive, gullible and ageing Pasquale seeks to improve his affairs. He rents a mansion that has 366 rooms and 68 balconies. The house owner lets the house out to him for five years for free on the condition that Pasquale will dispel the legend about terrifying ghosts and the house would finally start making a profit. The roguish caretaker, Rafael (black soul), assures Pasquale that the house is crowded with ghosts who steal everything they see, including different things but especially food. Pasquale believes it and mistakes for ghosts his wife's lover Alfredo (restless soul), brother-in-law Gaston (free soul), the caretaker's sister Carmela (cursed soul), and Alfredo's wife Armida (mournful soul) with children and family. Even the money that Alfredo plants in Pasquale's jacket pocket, the poor thing Pasquale takes for gifts from a ghost. And he wants things to stay this way forever. But his wife, Maria (lost soul) does not know the legend about the ghosts and views her husband's actions as the moral fall of a cuckold. A conflict situation arises, the meaning of which Pasquale is just incapable of comprehending! These misunderstandings are actually what the entire comic action of the play is built upon.

Director's interpretation

Tural Mustafayev removed from the character of Pasquale his belief in ghosts. In the director's version, this character is not that gullible and naive a person that wants to hide from life. No. He is a cunning and roguish crook who does not want to work but is obsessed with a passion for lucre. He is well aware that his wife is cheating on him. He also understands that his wife's lover puts money in his jacket pocket, but he pretends he is not aware. The reason is that seeing the banknotes gives him a feverish thrill and literally drives him crazy, making him forget about decency and male dignity. In the play, the appearance of Alfredo's wife with children and relatives terrifies Pasquale because the ghosts look like modern-day Neapolitans and not like 17th-century people. However, in the show, those are simply phantasmagorical figures devoid of any attractiveness. When looking at them, you involuntarily approve of Alfredo, who left (and did the right thing!) the exalted hysterical woman who hits on every man she sees (here, that's Pasquale), without it being clear exactly what she is trying to get, and at the same time, he left his goosy over-age children who, despite the money their daddy has, have preserved traces of intellectual degeneration and terrible ignorance on their faces!

The director obviously did not have the patience or desire to analyse the situation, which makes it look like a trick that was made up simply to amuse the audience. Well, to make things funnier. But things stop being funny after just two minutes, because a jumping, grabbing, adhering, pinching and plump fury that wears a pink dress and has a doll's cheeks is so annoying that you wish she was not there. Therefore, you feel unspeakably sorry for this poor thing Alfredo, who has, on the one hand, a family of idiots that cheat him out of his money and, on the other, greedy consumers. What Alfredo does is simply take banknotes out and give them away. You get a fairly natural question for the director: why does this character actually give his money away left and right with a maniacal selflessness? Is he a pathological altruist? What motivates him to do so? It is not clear. The director's speed reading diluted the author's plot, depriving it of a meaningful attractiveness and generating a lot of questions that start with the word "why?".

Why was this play selected? What was the target audience? What did the director mean to tell his audience by shifting dramaturgical accents and transforming a naive and gullible looser into a vulgar conformist consumer? The production does not answer those questions.