Dina Goder. Sleepy January

Sleepy January
Dina Goder

Publication date: January 31, 2005

This January remained sleepy until the very end: there were few premieres, and those that took place, for the most part, the theaters themselves did not consider it a shock for themselves, as if they still could not recover from the New Year holidays. Theatergoers watched what they didn’t have time to see just before the holidays. The first number here for the tormented soul of the critic was “ The Last Victim ” at the Maly Theater - already the third Moscow production of this play.

The production itself by Vladimir Dragunov was rather boring and archaic: traditional pavilions moved in a circle: wallpaper, paintings on the walls, tables, couches, samovars, doors, doors, doors. Merchants and townsfolk walked back and forth, the actors played boldly and fussily, as is usual for Maly. Trying to remind us that this is no longer the nineteenth century, the photographer invented by the director was fiddling around in the corner, and then suddenly, at a tragic moment in the plot, the action slowed down, the sky above the pavilion glowed red, and the characters, for no apparent reason, began to move slowly and speak sepulchrally. At that moment it smelled like the seventies of the twentieth century, but, fortunately, the director's newfangledness was only enough for about five minutes. The audience was not distracted by all this nonsense - for them it was all about the central acting couple - the rich man Pribytkov and the young widow Yulia Tugina, played by Vasily Bochkarev and Lyudmila Titova. this couple in the newspaper “Novye Izvestia” Olga Egoshina named “ The best love duet of 2004. ” ". The "love" turn of the plot looked quite unexpected; "The Last Victim" had not yet been staged as a play about the mutual passion of Flor Fedulych and Yulia. In the recent performance of the Moscow Art Theater, where the action was transferred to the refined beginning of the twentieth century, the gray-haired, respectable Pribytkov of Oleg Tabakov was more likely " “he bought” for his wife a woman who was desperate after her lover’s betrayal. And in Lenkom’s feverishly energetic performance, the lazy and slightly infernal Pribytkov Zbrueva simply waited until the widow herself fell into his hands, like a ripened pear.

In Maly, as Roman Dolzhansky writes in Kommersant, “The Last Victim” became a melodrama “about how a casual and frivolous feeling - between Yulia Tugina and a young gambler Vadim Dulchin - gives way to real and bright love that binds the same Yulia and Flora Fedulych . " Bochkarev plays incredibly charmingly. In light suits with a well-groomed grayish beard, he does not look at all like an old merchant: impetuous, with sparkling eyes, instantly reacting and making accurate decisions, not naive at all, but crafty, even cunning, but admiring Yulia in a boyish, direct, sincere and noisy way. . And although it is not easy for Lyudmila Titova to match the best theater artist, you can see in her what could seduce such a Pribytkov - an open and lively nature, an easy, cheerful disposition (Yulia was clearly a laugher among girls) and heartfelt responsiveness. Dragunov builds the finale like a sweet scene from a photographer, where the new Pribytkov family is photographed with a doll, as if with an unborn child. But the couple themselves are so sweet that even this fake happy ending doesn’t seem sickening.

The next expected premiere was at the very end of January. Roman Kozak staged Andrei Platonov's " Dzhan " at the branch of the Pushkin Theater , dividing the short story into three actors with the help of the young playwright Andrei Kureichik. Alla Sigalova plays in this performance, she is also listed as the choreographer, and since the main thing in the production is plasticity, it is clear that the authorship here belongs to her even more than to the titular Kozak. The hero “Jan” Nazar is played by young Alexander Matrosov, with his somewhat square and stable strength reminiscent of Deineka’s characters (which is probably correct for the 20s). Sigalova (credited in the program as "She") in a flaming red dress plays all the women, from Nazar's starving mother to a ten-year-old girl. And also a camel, a bird of prey and a tumbleweed bush. The third actor (Ilya Barabanov) plays all the other characters. Almost the entire text in the play is spoken by Nazar, voicing even the direct speech of the heroines, but this is for the best: Sigalova is not a dramatic actress and in those places where she still has to speak, she intones shamelessly, managing to fall into a state of anguish or collapse in just a few words. baby talk Another thing is surprising in the performance: Platonov’s story - chaste, mournful, full of thoughts about death and the transformation of man into lifeless sand - in this production unexpectedly makes the triumph of the flesh its main theme, and every meeting of Nazar with other flesh, and indeed with something... or another, turns into a dance of lust. Even when Sigalova portrays a tumbleweed, she drags the hero along with her, wraps herself around him, as if she were playing not a dry lump, but, for example, a love flower from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I won’t even describe what Nazar’s meeting with the camel turns into.

God knows why Platonov's story made such a strange somersault in the imagination of the directors. Most likely, she simply submitted to Sigalova’s specific talent. In any case, this performance, where the actors spend so much energy, and the audience sitting very close to them receives almost no energy, is not yet a reason to say that Platonov is completely impossible to stage.

It must be said that the past half of the season provided so few topics for discussion that critics decided to do something that they had previously allowed themselves very rarely - they began to review student performances, which, as we know, have a short life. It’s good that this year there was a worthy occasion: the graduation year has come for the GITIS acting and directing course of Sergei Zhenovach, who took over the workshop from Pyotr Fomenko. The main plot for most reviews was the play " Boys " (Ilyusha Snegirev's line from the novel "The Brothers Karamazov"), directed by Zhenovach himself. In this piercingly sentimental and pure performance based on Dostoevsky, there were no tricks or effects, it was just conversations on an empty stage, in essence, just an exemplary pedagogical work. But critics, discussing it, were amazed at the scale of the tasks set and one after another repeated that “this is the theater that exists nowhere else in the world, which, whether you like it or not, is the intangible property of the country, the mature fruit of the school that The whole world might really be the envy of him" ( Roman Dolzhansky, Kommersant ); "...watching this good and smart performance, you are once again convinced that the Russian theater school still remains one of the best in the world and that the main enemy of this school is, paradoxically, Russian theater practice, which is ruining all its achievements at the root " ( Marina Davydova, Izvestia ). “The Boys,” which graduate students are playing until the end of this year in Auditorium 39, under the roof of the Russian Academy of Theater Arts, is not easy for an ordinary theatergoer to see. But as part of the “Your Chance” project at the Theater Center on Strastnoy (it shows the best graduation performances of the capital, in the hope that here Moscow artistic directors will be able to choose their own actors), in January they played another play from Zhenovach’s course - “As You Like It . ”

The Shakespearean comedy was directed by student director Alexander Koruchekov, a former actor of Satyricon, who now already has directorial offers from both the Vakhtangov Theater and Sovremennik. The same Koruchekov who played Alyosha Karamazov in “Boys,” who is unusually similar to Zhenovach himself. His simple-minded, glorious performance, full of student fun and enthusiastic love, most of all in its mood resembles “Twelfth Night” of Fomenkov’s first production. True, it does not contain such obvious stars as the Kutepovs or Tyunin, but in terms of ingenuity, it is, perhaps, even ahead of Kamenkovich’s production. The second act is especially good, in which a forest of balloons grows in front of the heroes, fluttering on green strings of different lengths. They come up with all sorts of things with these balls: they are dragged back and forth, fencing off clearings and thickening the thicket (the balls do not fly away due to weight bags tied to the ends of the ropes), they are collected like flowers, they are pierced, depicting how they are torn the heart of a lover, and so on. While this performance is still alive, I advise you to go to it or send your children - schoolchildren and students - they will enjoy it. Usually “As You Like It” is played at the GITIS Educational Theater on Gnezdnikovsky Lane, where any viewer can attend, and the Center on Strastnoy also took it under its wing. There are also plans that the “Your Chance” program will be able to show the best graduation performances even after the students graduate from college (this was already practiced this year with the performances of the Shchukin School), then Shakespeare staged by Koruchekov will live until next year.

Well, the last January (and at the same time February) event that is worth mentioning is the next showing of the “Snowshow” by Vyacheslav Polunin. That is, the next performance of the famous play in itself is not a sensation, and it makes no sense to write for the hundred and first time about how beautiful, funny and heartwarming it is. The event should have been called “Polunin in the City”. Polunin, as you know, is the kind of engine in whose presence everything starts up - both living and dead. This time he came up with the idea of ​​inviting Nikolai Polissky, an artist known for his large-scale actions in the spirit of “land art” in the village of Nikolo-Lenivets. There, having gathered peasant assistants around him, Polissky built huge ziggurats from hay and logs, built a copy of the Shukhov Tower from thin branches, and a tall lighthouse from thick branches, and placed an army of snowmen across the vast snow field. So, Polunin decided to turn the village “land art” into urban “public art”, and Polissky, who arrived with ten peasants, made two hundred snowmen with the help of student actors in the courtyard of the Vakhtangov Theater, where the show was played. While they were sculpting, a thaw set in, and then Polunin came up with the idea of ​​“receiving snow from the population.” The population had difficulty getting snow, so they brought in a special “snow-making” machine, and then the frosts hit again. Polunin insisted that every snowman should have his own face - and so it was, and some of them surprisingly resembled the clown himself. They say that when an offer was made to extend the Moscow Snowshow tour, Slava decided that it was necessary to increase the number of snowmen on Arbat to a thousand.

But, of course, the presence of the celebrity was not limited to snowmen and the performance. In a row, at several venues, Polunin staged special theatrical stories about himself, and this, as always with him, turned into a separate show. This is how they filmed a video version of the autobiographical book that Slava is currently writing with the help of Natalya Tabachnikova. These meetings - in the House of Actors and in the Center on Strastnoy - will take place in February, they are very interesting to go to for those who know little about Polunin (much will become clear), but those who know something, I think, will not they will regret it: when Slava, stopping in the middle of the story, begins to play, it is impossible not to succumb to his charm. I remember how Victor Kramer, who directed “Snowshow,” talked about the shock of one foreign clown: “ Glory can stand like a pillar for two minutes and twist the fringe of the curtain, and the audience will look at him as if spellbound. And during this time, in order not to lose the public’s attention, I need ten tricks to do ". Take the opportunity to see this while Polunin is in town.