Klopp

Lilia Schittenburg

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Directed by Yury Butusov, Theater named after Lensovet, St. Petersburg

(Photo: Edgar Zinatulin )

Winner of the Golden Mask and Golden Spotlight, director Yuri Butusov is doomed to the close attention of the public to his theatrical works. After Camus's Caligula, Butusov firmly intended to direct The Idiot. But towards the end of the season, it turned out that his plans had changed dramatically, and instead of “The Idiot” we would be shown “The Bedbug”. Mayakovsky instead of Dostoevsky is a paradoxical choice only at first glance: the director continues to strictly follow his favorite aesthetic principles, turning any drama into material for clowning, farce, and eccentricity.

"Bedbug" is no exception. However, this particular performance demonstrated a certain exhaustion of the style. Butusov's "Bedbug" is a short "musical and dance" performance in which only the most percussive lines from the text are left, the logic of the action is replaced by its swiftness, the confusion in time is extraordinary (you should make sure that the director does not care about the time of action, when suddenly it is especially emphasized), the events of the play are the occasion for typically student sketches, more or less appropriate in meaning. The techniques used are old, borrowed from the training workshop: playing with a huge cloth (a white blanket fills the entire stage, the characters under it perform a very long dance suite to Sviridov’s music several times); a game with a piano standing alone on an empty stage, which “turns” now into a wedding table, now into a vehicle, now into a podium, now into a laboratory table - the characters play the old clownery “Operation”; a game with an “imaginary bug”, a game with a cigarette...

“The Bedbug” became an occasion for honing plastic skills, for meaningless fiery declamation, for the mechanical gaiety of young actors led by Konstantin Khabensky, dressed in the overalls of “university students” (they are workers, they are guests at a wedding, they are people future, etc.). Prisypkin, for whom - for contrast - they nevertheless sewed an expressive suit with two ties and a “Mayakovsky” cap. He did not acquire any human traits from this, since Mikhail Porechenkov completely deprived his hero of any individuality, not to mention drama, and the entire performance diligently played the audience’s favorite, “that same” famous artist who played the role of a national security agent.

Nevertheless, Butusov undoubtedly managed to make the absolute emptiness of his performance very dynamic, and this, and perhaps the length of the performance (an hour and twenty), provides the public with the opportunity to easily experience Lensoviet’s “The Bedbug” in concert performance.”