Dina Goder. In modern clothes

In modern clothes
Dina Goder

Publication date: December 16, 2004

As promised, the first half of December turned out to be a great one for the theater in Moscow! Since all this time the NET festival was going on, which this year was very successful, and even on the same days the Stanislavsky Season festival solemnly ended not only with the presentation of anniversary prizes, but also with the next premiere of Nyakrosius .

First about NET.

The festival of the New European Theater began with a one-man show by the French Hungarian Joseph Naja " The Diary of an Unknown ". Naja, a choreographer and artist, director, dancer and a bit of a clown, is very much loved in Moscow; he twice received the Golden Mask for the best foreign performance of the season, and this time his fans held their breath in anticipation of happiness. As a result, many of them were left disappointed: there was no integrity in the performance, “The Diary” looked confused and torn, like a series of strange pictures - flashes in the foggy mind of a suicide.

A light fence on the stage represented an apartment. Bizarre shadows lay on its walls and doors: either a huge, human-sized light bulb grew, reflected in the dark glass, or streams of water formed into figures, and invisible hands left wet traces. The thunder rumbled and the rain rustled without stopping. From behind the wall, Nadge’s fingers first appeared, timidly feeling the ceiling, then he himself with his sharp and brittle plastic and the alarming gaze of a madman. It was said that the source of the "Diary" was Naj's own diary from the years when he was still a student at the Budapest School of Fine Arts, and two of his friends committed suicide, and the third went crazy. But from the performance it is difficult to understand whether Nudge has one hero or several of them.

The way he moves bears little resemblance to a dance: he will suddenly make several convulsive movements in a row, similar to a hasty story, and again climb onto the chair, tucking his legs under him, as if afraid to touch the floor. The hero gradually removes the walls of the apartment one after another, leaving in the depths only one luminous window into the bathroom, where, if you pull back the curtain, you can see a dangling strangler in a suit and hat. In this performance, the fear of death is constantly intertwined with the desire for it. The hero either plays with a rope, wrapping it around his neck, or twirls a knife that came down to him from nowhere. Either he takes the hanged man out of the noose and rocks him in the bath, as if in a cradle, or he shaves with a huge ax, and then sticks it into a wooden table and lays his head next to it, trying on the pose of someone sentenced to beheading. He is not afraid of a knife and an ax, nor of death at his own hands. Such death is easy and understandable, you want to experience it. Only the roar of rain, the rustling of leaves, unknown traces and strange moving shadows on the walls evoke inexplicable horror in him.

Nudge was a “special guest” of the festival - after all, he is significantly older than the thirty-something-year-old directors of the new generation on which NET is built. Another “special” project is the world premiere of the play “ Genesis #2 ”, commissioned by the Stuttgart Theater Festival. "Genesis..." is a play by Ivan Vyrypaev, staged by Viktor Ryzhakov, who, after the success of last year's "Oxygen", became a new favorite of NET. The legend of the new production is as follows: a play about God and Lot’s wife was written by a certain mathematics teacher Antonina Velikanova, who was in a mental hospital with a diagnosis of “acute schizophrenia.” Through her attending physician, she passed it on to Vyrypaev, who only slightly processed this text, supplemented it with letters that Velikanova wrote to him, divided the text into episodes and, using the texts of the same Antonina, composed several zongs that interrupted the action. Most of the critics writing about this performance believe that Velikanova is a hoax. Or, as Gleb Sitkovsky from Gazeta wrote, “ the author’s hallucination .” I think that Velikanova, like her text, exist, they can be presented, but, of course, the rhythm of the text, its poetic organization and the whole set of themes that are mixed in this performance - from sex and violence to the dispute about the existence of God - are typical Vyrypaevskie

Two actors play on an empty square of the stage: Alexander Bargman portrays God (performing under the name of the attending physician Arkady Ilyich), Svetlana Ivanova - Lot's wife (by the will of the author she is called Antonina Velikanova). They argue whether God exists, and God-Arkady Ilyich himself denies this. In addition, the accordion player and Ivan Vyrypaev take part in the performance - he, with his hands in his pockets, wearing a cap and a baggy jacket, like a guy from the outskirts, comes out to the audience to sing mocking and obscene couplets between episodes. “Eh, in every house there is anal, yes group, yes lesbian, yes incest!.. Eh, the day of prostitution is the day of world reconciliation!” "The dead woman sleeps in a dead sleep, and the dead husband suffers from loneliness..."

The actors are very charming - the self-confident doctor (“Hello, I’m your Arkady Ilyich! Do you recognize me?”), and the radiantly sly Antonina (“It’s not so easy to go crazy, but I’d really like to...”), and, of course, Vyrypaev, from whom, as always, comes a wave of acting drive that electrifies the hall. But the whole spectacle as a whole gives the impression not so much of a well-organized madness, but rather a vinaigrette of damned teenage questions and complexes. And there is no doubt that festival success is guaranteed for him.

In addition to Vyrypaev’s play, the NET program included two more domestic productions: the Moscow Art Theater “Playing the Victim” (a play by the Presnyakov brothers, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov), which we have already written about, and “Mr. Carmen” by the St. Petersburg AXE Theater. The performance of the "Achaeans" - mocking alchemists, artists and engineers - this time was a duel between two bearded men (Maxim Isaev and Pavel Semchenko - "gentlemen Carmen") on names. Pavel, shaved head, dressed in a skirt, with a long earring in his ear, defended Carmen. The red-haired, bespectacled Maxim spoke on behalf of Jose. “Carmen” and “Jose”, stepping on each other, they wrote with smoke, a ray of light, splashes of water, paint on polyethylene and a wet rag on the floor, threads, ink and blood. As the authors themselves said in the program about the performance: “This is the gentleman who crossed out all the words “Carmen” in Merimee’s text and wrote “Jose” over it. This is Jose, who signed the suicide note with the name Carmen.”

Four more performances that took part in NET were staged by Lithuanian Oskaras Korsunovas, Thomas Ostermeier and Arpad Schilling - stars of the very New European Theater for which this festival was conceived seven years ago. The performances that the young directors brought to us, famous for staging shocking modern texts, were, firstly, entirely classic. Secondly, they were all, to one degree or another, located in the tradition of realistic theater. And thirdly, they were all dressed in modern costumes. This was becoming a trend.

The headliner of the current NET was definitely the thirty-six-year-old head of the famous Berlin Schaubühne, Thomas Ostermeier . The festival organizers have been trying to achieve his arrival for several years, but only this year, thanks to the help of the “Russian-German Cultural Meetings”, it was possible. Ostermeyer brought two performances at once: Ibsen's "Nora" in the adaptation of Marius von Mayenburg and, as an afterword to it, a wordless one-man show "Concert on request" based on Franz Xaver Kretz. "The Burrow" became the story of the life of a current yuppie family: lawyer Helmer, a recently appointed bank director, his pretty unemployed wife and three children. They live in a stylish two-story apartment, similar to an advertising picture, where instead of a wall there is a huge aquarium, they are friends with the same young joker and joker Dr. Rank (in this version he turns out to be a bisexual patient with AIDS), listen to rock music and choose Nora T-shirt, shorts and pistols of Lara Croft. Masterfully produced, energetic and somewhat glossy, Ostermeier's production presented our audience with high quality European mainstream theater. The “Concert on Requests” showed a different side of German theater - it was quiet, intimate and very marginal.

In the finale of "Nora" according to Mayenburg, the heroine, instead of telling her husband everything and leaving him, fired a full clip from a revolver at Helmer. And therefore, Ostermeier considered Kretz’s text, which shows a dull evening in the life of a lonely woman, as an option for the development of Nora’s fate after her release from prison, where she would have been sent for murder. In Kretz's play, which resembled one long stage direction, Anne Tismer (the same actress who played Nora) played with incredible and slightly grotesque detail the pathetic, lonely neat Fräulein Rush from the moment when she, having returned from work, opens the door of the apartment, undresses, changes shoes and turns on the battery, before, unable to fall asleep, she drinks the entire pack of sleeping pills one after another and thus ends her mechanically monotonous life. Ostermeyer and Tismer are thorough in German, recording every detail: preparing sandwiches, playing solitaire on the computer, washing tights, cauterizing a pimple on the chin. One of the most intense episodes in the play is Fräulein Rush’s visit to the toilet, which also happens before our eyes. Here Fraulein Rush sits on the toilet and pees (we hear gurgling). Then her gaze becomes more concentrated, her face turns red. You can hear the poop splashing into the water. Again and again. Groaning and moaning - apparently constipation. Having dried himself off, he immediately washes the toilet with a brush, wipes the seat, and opens the small window to ventilate. The festival organizers were very afraid that this scene would cause a big scandal among the Moscow theater community (not a single NET in recent years has gone without a scandal), but, oddly enough, there was no noise, and the sophisticated theater public liked the “Concert by Request” more than the spectacular "Nora".

Oskaras Korsunovas brought “ Romeo and Juliet ” to Moscow - the same performance that was commissioned by the Avignon Festival last year, but was never shown then due to its cancellation. In the Lithuanian version, Shakespeare's tragedy is also thrown into modern times. Here, the warring clans are rival families of bakers, the stage set looks like two huge metal kitchens hung with dishes, and blond Romeo and red-haired little Juliet in a flowered dress are just the youngest in the company of broken “factory” youth. At first, the cheerful competition between the Montague and Capulet families seems like fun: flour flies, and the bakers compare themselves with huge phalluses fashioned from dough. But gradually hefty kitchen knives are used, and the murdered Tybalt and Mercutio, and behind them the main characters with faces whitened with flour, seem like characters from ancient tragedies in masks of grief. Critics found in this performance some superficiality and monotony of techniques, but nevertheless could not resist the charm of the actors, as well as the rapid, energetic rhythm of the production. Korshunovas masters his profession in a way that few Russian directors of his age do. And, to be honest, those who are older.

NET's main surprise was " The Seagull " by thirty-year-old Arpad Schilling, completely unknown in Russia, played on a small empty piece of the stage, surrounded by spectator seats. The frank simplicity of this theater was almost shocking: the actors, dressed in what they wore to the performance today, walked around the foyer with the audience before the start of the performance and took seats in the front rows, from where they began to conduct their dialogues. And in the finale there were no bows - the audience met the actors already in the foyer, where they stood, holding their coats in their hands, like spectators about to leave. No decorations, props, special lighting, Nina - in jeans and a short knitted blouse, Masha - in a black dress with trousers, an elderly plump Arkadina with the habits of a bohemian star - in trousers and a low-cut sweater that slides off one shoulder, then the other . There are almost no changes in the play, except that some very noticeable connections to the times of a hundred years ago have been shortened. The rest is trivial: Sorin was called not an actual state councilor, but the chairman of the Culture Commission, they whisper about Trigorin that he is a foreigner (he is indeed played not by a Hungarian, but by a German actor), the young, spectacular Polina is considered not a mother, but a stepmother of Masha. The actors perform wonderfully, but the best thing about this performance is how they know how to create direct and intimate contact with the audience, each of whom feels that he is also one of the participants in the life of this house: he is told, consulted with, or flirted with , they ask him for something. Of course, if this performance had been performed on a regular stage, such an effect would have been impossible.

Well, what can you say: NET brought unconditional European hits, and after this year’s brilliant program, in which there were no failures or even passable productions, the prestige and weight of this small private festival in the general festival movement should grow greatly.

And finally, about Nyakrosius , who closed the Stanislavsky Season with the premiere. For the sake of this event, the organizers of NET even expanded the performances in their program, realizing that the festival audience would first of all rush to the Song of Songs.

It seems that the next premiere of Nyakrosius caused confusion among both fans and critics. This production looked like a clear continuation of last year's seasonal epic by Donelaitis, but was made with even simpler means, just like a children's play. On an almost empty stage with empty hands. Nothing but young actors dressed in the most ordinary costumes: dresses, trousers, shirts. They made up everything they needed from those items that were at hand in any home: paper, thread, rope, an apple, a knife, some sticks. Rolls of paper are the scrolls of the sages, and a trumpet, and oars, and an organ, pulling ropes indicate a house, and nets are woven from threads.

Nyakroshyus stages “The Song of Songs” as a village love story between a thin girl with huge eyes and a tall hulk. Meetings and separations, attempts to lure and the desire for independence, the beginning of love and forced separation. For the most part, this story develops without words, but in those moments when the simple-minded heroes begin to speak in the sublime erotic language of Solomon’s song: “Honey and milk are under your tongue, and the fragrance of your clothes is like the fragrance of Lebanon!”, the scale of the love story increases many times over. The speech of the heroes is full of Old Testament metaphors; they compare each other to animals and plants, and Nyakrosius immediately turns them into those being spoken of. The girl becomes a mare, which is caught for shoeing, and the young man becomes a falcon, caught for banding. And you don’t need anything to turn into a bird: you put the hooked knife of a steel scythe to your face - and that’s the beak. But it seems that Nyakrosius’s “fall into simplicity” is indeed perceived by many as a heresy - I have never seen so many people leaving the performances of the famous director as these days from the theater hall of the House of Music. Although the performance runs without intermission for only two hours

In the last two productions of Nyakrosius - based on Donelaitis and Song of Songs - the director turned out to be some kind of new side. It was as if his outlook on life had changed. It’s not that he began to like her - his performances continue to remain tragic - but he simply began to accept her. He talks about blossoming and withering, love and death, and for this he no longer needs plays with skillful intrigue. He takes iconic ancestral texts and spiritualizes simple stories with them, giving us an understanding that human life following nature is deep and majestic.