Theatre of ideas: Plato’s dialogues in the theatrical experiences of A. Vasiliev

The article, using the example of the theatrical experiments of director Anatoly Vasiliev with Plato's dialogues, reveals how philosophical ideas, when translated from the language of literature and philosophy into the language of theater, turn into ideas theatre, as Alain Badiou calls them. In the 1990s, A. Vasiliev moved in the practice of the theater of the School of Dramatic Art from the method of psychological (situational) theater to metaphysical theater and game structures. In this methodological turn of the director from the theater of character to the theater of the person, and then to the theater of ideas, he includes Plato's dialogues in his practice as a propaedeutic of acting. The article provides a theatre studies analysis of the stage sketches of the School of Dramatic Art based on Plato's dialogues, combined with a historical and philosophical analysis of some key concepts of Plato's dialogues "The Republic" and "Euthydemus". The scenery and costumes in the theatrical experiments of A. Vasiliev and his colleagues at the School of Dramatic Art based on Plato's dialogues have several functions: they are stage mechanisms, most o en absurd, and visual quotations, for example, from R. Magritte's paintings. Together with the actors' play, they create a material environment with which the texts of the dialogues are connected. The various components of the idea theatre: the text and the actors' play, the scenery and costumes do not interact directly with each other, the scenery and play do not illustrate the text, but o en enter into confrontation with it. The theatre is inclined to a literal reading of complex concepts and metaphors, minor details in the text on stage turn out to be central, so that the meaning of the situation sometimes changes to the opposite. Confrontation, literalness, reversibility are the ways in which theatre thinks about philosophical text.