Shock therapy

The Polish theater is not shy in the means of expression

Elfrida Elinek’s “Babylon” in the production of the Polish Theater from the Bydgosch, shown in Moscow at the Golden Mask festival, is not a spectacle for lovers of the beautiful. They play here not on stage, but on the nerves
One of the strangest literary personalities of our time, a Czech Jewish who lives in Austria and writing in German, the 2004 Nobel Prize laureate, the recluse and feminist, the author of the “pianists” and “mistresses” Elfrid Elinek examines a person exclusively through the prism of today, sending him a test from the newspaper lanes and from the chronicle of the Internet. Elinek denies any taboo from physiology to political correctness. Her method of communicating with the audience is shock therapy. The instrument is human feelings that it dissects as an experienced pathologist, and impassively considers under the magnifying hem every extracted hair of the nerve, increased to the size of a large fat worm.

White on black is said that female cruelty in terms of mercilessness is incomparable with the male. "Babylon" was invented by a woman and set by a woman - director Maya Klechevskaya. For three hours on the black tiles and in a black scene spilled throughout the scene, four women and four men will tell you about what lives in the subconscious of every person, which can only appear in nightmare, or in a feverish delirium, or in semi -fossil erotic fantasies. If you manage to swallow, overcome the first shock from the inside out the bleeding world and you, in response to the “Well, went on x ... from here!” Do not jump up and do not run away, sobbing from the insult, then your next step will be knowledge.

The heroes floundering in their own subconscious, as in a puddle spilled over the space of the scene, a blonde in dark glasses and a white fur coat, worn on a naked body, begs the doctor to take care of her unborn son. The blonde with a groomed nervous face thanks God for the Son, whom she pushes in front of her in a wheelchair - the ugly creature of the indefinite sex writes in cramps and makes inarticulate sounds, trying to grab the mother’s breasts with a slobbery mouth. A blonde with drawn black antennae tears off her terry robe and arranges a crazy, ugly striptease in front of a motionless fat man with a glance glazed with a TV. A man walks in a stroller a disabled girl in a white dress, white shoes and white golfs. He takes it off the chair, puts it on the blanket, plays with its paralyzed legs, arms, fingers, he seems to give her the heat of the sun, moisture moisture, and the breath of the wind. He spreads her insensitive legs, blows into her open, suppressed mouth, and then covers her with a blanket like a broken doll, and takes him into the darkness. The bride in a white dress and with a white bouquet pressed to his chest, looking somewhere and dousing with tears, the monologue of care, farewell, and the object of her genuine grief will be the penis, which is as divine for her as with her mother-nature ...

Before us is the world embraced, dissolved, defocated, in which there is no place for no will or dignity. Everything is blurred, spreading - like mascara on tearful female eyes.

The birth of freedom, the unexpected appearance of a happy pregnant blonde to cheerful careless music brings long -awaited relief. The blonde dancing cheerfully, hugging her large round stomach with thin hands and coquettishly shaking with blond hair. And only when she calls us to execute her orders with a wide male gesture, it becomes clear that the blonde is a man! The blonde man teaches us to breathe correctly and even calls a volunteer from the hall to demonstrate useful exercises on a rubber ball with his help, and then he shouts one word piercingly: “Struggle! Struggle! Struggle!" Pregnancy - as a struggle for oneself, for its self, which dissolves, disappears as the abdomen grows. Laughter and shock are constantly adjacent. At some point, the body begins to confuse the funny with terrible, and at that moment the authors of the performance clearly achieve their goal: confusing our consciousness, mixing and turning our emotions, they free us from conventions, from the taboo, to prepare for the main thing.

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A person born of violence carries him all his life and gets rid of him only after death

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Even the phenomenon of an angel will not save the heroes of Babylon from a rapid fall into the abyss

The living and the dead world is divided into victims and executioners, a person born of violence, carries him all his life and gets rid of him only after death. A miserable Christ - as a mockery of the world in which mothers lose their sons, devour their sons, adultely with their sons. Three scenes, three female monologues are played out in the morgue, where naked men's corpses are on the iron shelves. As if unable to withstand female despair, dead lifeless bodies turn alive for a short moment, but then again spread over the cold zinc of death.

God-human runs a world in which death becomes a relief, award, and life is mourned as an irreparable tragedy. God deprives humanity of the mind, frees it from morality, and then Sergeant Charles Grander, the god of prison Abu Graib, becomes the hero of the century. Submy naked boys and girls will run on his team on his team, masturbate, make up a pyramid, ride on the floor ... submission turns them into slaves who no longer need the executioner, in the overseer-they will repeat and repeat, repeat and repeat, repeat and repeat ...

The final part of the performance is six zoons, which, performed by actor Sebastian, turn into a new torture, into a new test. A painfully thin, naked artist will be in a huge knife in a red inflatable heart, and it will explode with spray blood, will tear the hospital diaper into shreds, exposing the penis covered with adhesive ribbon, and shouting shocking texts into the microphone: “I break the Araba throat in the trash, then lifting the toast for lovely ladies”; “Take an ordinary sharp knife, stuck it into the pulp of the body” ... He announces the name of the songs in Russian and demands, demands to sing in chorus with him. The depressed, exhausted by three hours of exorcism, the hall is no longer conducted for songs ...

No need to paradise , of course, our soul, burned by the sun of socialist realism, requires a way out. She beats and screams - give me a way out! Do not roll me into the mud! But neither Elinech nor Klechevskaya output is not only offered, they even pour concrete in the wall, tightly sealing their german ship. So that we all suffocate, finally, from our own moral bowel movements. In order to stop climbing to the saving “exit”, pushing each other, pressing the heels of someone's heads and crumbs with the elbows of someone's teeth. There, in the blackness of the universe, there is nothing. There is only what you built and what you built - you know.

The final part of the play is six zoons, which, performed by Sebastian, turn into a new torture for the audience to listen to such ruthless sentences to themselves, and even using extremely hard vocabulary, of course, is not very pleasant. And our viewer, for the most part, perceiving theater as one of the forms of leisure, such art "saw in a coffin." Professionals and gourmets usually go to such performances - critics, advanced youth, bohemian intellectuals. But “Babylon” is not even a metropolitan phenomenon, this performance from a small, albeit enlightened city of Bydgosch. In this provincial theater, in addition to the ultramodern Elinek, there are a “three -sided opera”, and “meek”, “Platonov”, and “three sisters”. I look at the actors and understand how they can all play. Due to their absolute readiness to fulfill any directorial decision, they achieved the degree of freedom when they are able to reincarnate in what and into anyone. And in their most crazy embodiment, they will be convincing, passionate and incredibly diverse in manifestations of feelings and emotions. But these are not superstars, these are just artists who masterfully do their work - black, ugly, causing either dumbfound, then disgust, then irritation, then pity. I look at the stage and see not naked men, not fascinated by their nudity, not sweaty, with mascara of women, but magnificent, free, liberated actors, immersed in the most difficult depths of the text, understanding the meaning of pronounced words that can improvise, without breaking the director's drawing.

They play a performance about humanity, without going beyond their soul, their small private space, filled with empathy for the world. That is why you believe in their concern for humanity. And in ours - no.