"God, so many people had died and they still haven't finished counting them. But no one has counted us, ants, although there was no one who walked on earth so silently like us", says the Ant, one of the most striking characters of the Rezo Gabriadze puppet theatre play The Battle of Stalingrad. The play was staged in 1994 and was Gabriadze's first project upon his return from France where he found refuge during the civil war in Georgia (1992-1994).
The battle of Stalingrad covers the five year period and territories from Stalingrad towards Kiev and from Moscow to Berlin. The battle itself is just a context, a frame within which the audience follows several fates parallelly, including generals of the army, horses and ants whose lives are affected and determined by war. There is a horse named Aljosha who is searching for his beloved Natasha, a circus mare; then a boy named Yesha whom we first meet as an ice-cream man and next time we see him as a crazed returnee from the battlefield who is carrying a kalishnikov and interrupts into a wedding with it; there is also an elegant painter and a spy, Molder, who smokes in a decadent Berlin cafe at one moment and the next, falls in front of it hit by bullets fired by an unknown attacker... Among characters there is also a soldier from Odessa, the Soviet general Gorenko, the German field marshal who leads his soldiers to various wars within two millenniums.
Gabriadze portrays his characters as tragic and comic and absurd, regardless of the warring side they belong to. Their stories are presented as mutually interwoven poetic fragments, in the literary and visual form of a collage. The author uses different kinds of puppets - marionettes, gignoles, shadow puppets of various sizes and materials. On his small puppet stage - box, he is able to produce spectacular effects using very simple means.