Dina Goder. New, newer, even newer...

If we consider that a theatrical season (or even a month) can have a leading motive, we must admit that the second half of September was under the star of “new drama”. First of all, because the “new drama” was the loudest Moscow premiere of these two weeks - the Moscow Art Theater production of the Presnyakov brothers’ play “ Playing the Victim ,” directed by Kirill Serebrennikov .

Another cheerful absurdist vinaigrette of two cheerful brothers tells about a young man whose job is to portray a victim in police investigative experiments. The play is mocking, generously seasoned with literary reminiscences such as the pathetic-parody “Hamlet” and the equally parodic and tearful “Butterfly”. And the ending is predictable - the guy had to participate in the investigative experiment as an accused.

With this story, as before, the crafty Presnyakovs had an incident. Just as from their “Terrorism,” also staged at the Moscow Art Theater, interpreters began to derive a short, pathetic and conveniently formulated idea (they say, terrorism is everywhere around us - in the family, in the bedroom, and at work), so they reached out to “The Victim” for answers. And she says that it costs nothing to kill nowadays, and, on the contrary, it talks about the fear of death, and so on. Everyone wanted a definite and necessarily serious meaning: without this we have no respect. Those same interpreters who were unable to extract a short and important thought from “The Sacrifice” were offended and criticized the play. (They would have tried to formulate something similar about, say, “The Big Lebowski”, and the Coen brothers are the first analogy to the Presnyakov brothers!).

Serebrennikov, who staged the play as a bright, energetic farce, although he tried not to make a significant appearance, also swallowed the bait, and now the young hero of the play, performed by student Pyotr Kislov, walks with a suffering gaze among the clown characters and pronounces his monologues with unbearable pathos. The most revealing number in the fraternal deception was the policeman's monologue, which almost cost the life of the entire production. The fact is that this monologue - the only one in the play - was thickly filled with obscenities. As they say, Tabakov was not even sure whether it was worth releasing “this” on the sacred Moscow Art Theater stage. Of course, all the reviewers - both defenders and detractors of the performance - tried to somehow evaluate and explain the odious dramatic move. Gleb Sitkovsky from the Gazeta newspaper reflects this way: “The Presnyakov brothers, having taken it away from Hamlet, handed over the conclusion about the rot in the Danish kingdom to a simple police captain, who, unlike the Danish princes, does not stand on ceremony when choosing words: “Where the f... did you come from?” here?! As long as I lived, I never thought that I would end up in such a fucking nation!" However, his monologue sounds, despite the appropriate gestures for the occasion, for some reason not very convincingly. After all, the captain only feigns ardor. And if Hamlet - Valya wanted to pronounce his monologue, then he would probably say: “To be or not to be - one x...”. And Roman Dolzhansky from Kommersant considers Presnyakov’s technique convincing: “It’s unlikely that today’s auditorium would be seriously imbued with the theme if such a monologue were delivered in a high calm. But in the play “Playing the Victim,” it is in this place that the sincere unity of the audience and the stage reaches its maximum degree. So there is no reason for the founding fathers to spin in their graves. " Anna Gordeeva from the newspaper "Vremya Novostei" argues with him: "Vitaly Khaev, ... diligently - but not very convincingly - pronounces all the words that a policeman could utter in such a situation. It could - no doubt. I would have said it exactly. But is it worth saying them from the stage... For me, it’s not worth it. Accuracy is not an argument here, there are limits to it - if they play a homeless person on stage, no one will reproduce the authentic smell."

And in my opinion, discussions about credibility and persuasiveness are generally inapplicable to this monologue (as to all of Presnyakov’s drama). Why say that in obscene form the pathos of this speech is more intelligible, if the pathos here is not just reduced, but completely killed by obscenities. But that, in fact, was the task. For the Presnyakovs, the point is not to prove that the captain is offended for his homeland - but to break prohibitions, shock the audience, unsettle them, provoke them. The theater is almost the only place where there are still a lot of prohibitions, the more fun it is to break them. The brothers beckoned again, gave out a handful of hints, who liked which one, nodded slyly - they say, yes, yes, you are absolutely right, but they slipped away.

We continue the theme of “new drama”. On the stage of the branch of the Pushkin Theater, which the theater’s current chief director Roman Kozak is trying to make experimental, a play by the young Croatian author Mate Matisic “ The Priest’s Children ” appeared. The play makes a rather wild impression: it begins with the exposure of a priest who, together with a kiosk man, is making holes in condoms, trying to increase the Croatian birth rate. Further, the matter is complicated by a bunch of parallel stories and characters: crazy lovers, a child thrown under the doors of a church, a dead sapper and his pregnant violinist girlfriend, numerous suicides, then the souls of the dead are included, the voice of an unborn baby, and so on. According to Olga Egoshina from Novye Izvestia, “An action-packed performance with a lot of deaths, pistol shots and children’s crying is intended primarily for viewers brought up on television series.” “In essence, this dramatic material by the Croatian writer, in terms of the number of completely independent plots, could well become the basis of a series for ten evenings.” Television analogies in this kind of plays are appropriate (and when discussing the Moscow Art Theater’s “The Sacrifice,” Gleb Sitkovsky wrote: “The Presnyakov brothers are playwrights who have seen enough of television. And on television, you know what”). Although in the case of Matisic, it seems to me that cinema is closer - a crazy and cheerful Balkan mess of the “Kusturitsev” spill, where neither war nor numerous deaths and losses cancel out the general rejoicing. The young director Alexander Ogarev, apparently, had this type of spectacle in mind when turning “The Priest’s Children” into a rollicking and excessive clownery (the youngest actors enjoy it the most - the literally jumping out of his pants Denis Yasik, who plays the kiosk worker, and the enthusiastically squeaky Irina Petrova as a woman in labor from a mental hospital). Of course, not a single reviewer could ignore the return of Nikolai Chindyaykin from television series to the stage (he was famous in the theater as a director, who, together with Anatoly Vasiliev, staged the legendary “Lamentations of Jeremiah”). But the meaningful Chindyaykin, perhaps, only made it heavier and added extra pathos to the performance, which, despite the obvious madness and redundancy, looked entertaining.

Further in our listing we should talk about the premiere at the theater "On Malaya Bronnaya" based on Vladimir Zherebtsov's play "Invitation to the Parterre" (his "Soldiers" was staged at the Tabakerka not so long ago). But here the spectacle staged by Lev Durov for his anniversary turned out to be so archaic that it’s awkward to even talk about it. However, the clumsy detective play by the young author, although it depicted the horrors of domestic capitalism, with its old-fashioned tone was quite consistent with the production of the veteran. But she, too - no matter how you look at it - was a “new drama”.

And in those same days, “ A Romance with Cocaine ” was shown on the stage of the Youth Theater - a dramatization of a novel published in France in the 30s by a certain M. Ageev, who was long mistaken for Nabokov. Of course, the text of “A Romance with Cocaine” - these supposed diary entries of a young man, at the same time flowery, as in the early twentieth century, and referring to Dostoevsky’s “underground” hero - cannot in any way be attributed to a new drama. But one of the central lines for the novel - everything connected with the theme of altered consciousness, shifted, parodic and terrible reality - could be dissected in a play written for the theater in a very modern way. It is a pity that Natalya Skorokhod, an author known for her unusual, authorized dramatizations, when adapting Ageev for the stage, took a deliberately losing traditional path, which critics immediately noted. Gleb Sitkovsky , Gazeta newspaper: “The monologues were cleverly chopped in two and remade by the author of the dramatization, Natalya Skorokhod, into clumsy dialogues. The hero has to enter into heated arguments not with himself, but, for example, with the head doctor of the hospital to which a suicide cocaine addict is brought, or even with a random janitor." Olga Egoshina , “Novye Izvestia”: “In Natalya Skorokhod’s play and Oleg Rybkin’s production, first of all, Vadim himself was lost, as a person through whose eyes we see the other characters. And Vadim (Stepan Morozov) appeared, whom we perceive “from the outside.” Dense, thoroughly earthly, very uncomplicated, it bears little resemblance to its painful novel prototype. The story of the wanderings of the soul is replaced by a rather conventional investigation, conducted by the Chief Doctor (Alexander Ustyugov) and Sonya (Irina Nizina). Snatching from each other the pages of the suicide's manuscript, they try to understand , which was the reason for his cocaine poisoning. What in the novel is the result of a long chain, in the play is the initial event. A mistake at the level of design fatally destroys almost all components of the play. The intrigue that holds the plot sags. And the play breaks up into a series of more or less successful (usually less) scenes-illustrations, which brought the high school student, and then student Vadim, to “life like this.”

Oleg Rybkin, a student of Fomenko, formerly the famous chief director of the Novosibirsk "Red Torch", whose performances were nominated for the Golden Mask many times, now staging in St. Petersburg and Moscow, seemed to always be inclined towards modern and tough theater. Among his best and most scandalous productions is “The Presidents,” based on the play by one of the celebrities of the German-language “new drama” Werner Schwab. In that Novosibirsk performance, home gatherings with the boring chatter of bourgeois neighbors reached the point of enthusiastic dreams on fecal topics, and in the end turned into a bloody “witches’ kitchen.” This time Rybkin decided to hold back his demons and present the novel in straightforward school language so that the story of a low and gifted character became like an edifying plot from the life of a charming but disobedient schoolboy. Perhaps this was the order, or perhaps the director himself suggested that the teen play must be vegetarian.

Well, in St. Petersburg at that time the most amazing “ New Drama ” was going on. I mean the festival of the same name. For the most part, it consisted of well-known productions in Moscow - capital premieres and performances that had already come to the Moscow "New Drama". There was something new here too: for example, theater people finally turned to other arts and held two whole “film days”, at which short films shot by young directors were shown and discussed (curated by Boris Khlebnikov). But, probably, the main news for everyone was the unexpected success of the “New Drama” in St. Petersburg, which had previously not accepted the lowly and scandalous tone of the new theater. And this, too, is the theatrical result of the second half of September.