Dina Goder. Planed

Over the past two weeks, unexpectedly many premieres have happened, which are usually called “status”. The kind where the elite and the entire, as they say, “critical corps” come to shine. The kind that every publication considers necessary to write about, even if it has never been interested in theater. Well, in general, those about whom in polite society it is pleasant to say, as if in passing: “I was here the other day at the premiere... N was amazing, and NN got so fat!”

It all started with " King Lear " at the Art Theater, shown in the last days of October. World celebrity Tadashi Suzuki, who has long been trying to marry European and Japanese theatrical traditions, staged King Lear at the Art Theater - a repeat of his own production twenty years ago. The director assures that the current performance is “different and fresh,” but it is clear that all the main components of the previous Japanese version have been preserved in the Russian version. The number of characters and the text of the tragedy itself are greatly reduced (Moscow critics unanimously called this action a comic book), everyone is dressed in a kimono, female roles are played by men, and Lear himself, according to the plot, is in a mental hospital and sits in a gurney, accompanied by a nurse (her too, Of course, the player is a man). If this “Lear” is “different”, it is only thanks to the young Russian actors who cannot, even by freezing for a long time and pushing out the text in the form of sharp cries, as required by Suzuki’s method, not to allow a little psychologism. In most cases, it does not look dramatic, but rather funny, like the bearded Regan (Dmitry Kulichkov) insidiously rolling her eyes or the athletic Cordelia with a mournful face (Evgeniy Savinkov). Not to mention the nurse (Oleg Topolyansky), who, sitting in a short robe on the floor near Lear’s chair, chuckles over a book and reads the jester’s lines from it to the patient. The only one who manages, under the conditions of Suzuki's restrictions, to maintain some meaningfulness in the role and look impressive is Lear, played by Anatoly Bely , with slow sculptural plasticity and powerful internal tension.

In preparation for the performance, the Moscow Art Theater actors spent two months doing special training in Shizuoka, where Suzuki’s theatrical empire was built, and still the combination of Japanese and Russian looked comical. Luxurious patterned kimonos, made from antique fabrics, looked like satin robes from the Moscow Art Theater stage, and journalists, already in Moscow, who saw exactly how the training was conducted, giggled indecently, saying that the actors either walked slowly or sharply shouted: “Schmuck!” Marina Davydova wrote in the Izvestia newspaper: “ Suzuki’s best performances could be compared with the calm before a thunderstorm, with the thunderstorm itself, with the light of a flame, with the flow of a river, with the ascent to Mount Fuji and with a blooming flower. I would like to compare King Lear with the Indian a film, a Mexican TV series and a cartoon about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But if the meeting of two theatrical cultures is possible only in the space of kitsch, isn’t it better for them to never meet at all? ".

If Russian actors, perhaps, simply could not convey the Japanese tradition to the audience, then those ideas and moves that Suzuki gleaned from the European theater turned out to be quite clear and hopelessly outdated. Starting with the statement “the whole world is a madhouse”, which was popular in the era of frontal concepts of the 70s, and ending with music - Tchaikovsky and Handel - as if taken from a collection of popular classical plays.

status” premiere of the month also belonged to the Moscow Art Theater, where Chusova staged Moliere’s Tartuffe The second “ Nina . There really was something to count on here. Firstly, young and fashionable Chusova with her exuberant vitality and comic talent. Secondly, Tabakov in the role of Tartuffe literally created for him. Then - the charming fat man Semchev - Orgon, costumes by Pavel Kaplevich, music by Oleg Kostrov. In general, anything could happen. Did not happen. Critics one after another called the production pointless. Roman Dolzhansky (" Kommersant "): " The production of Tartuffe... is frighteningly, ringingly empty and stupid... It must be difficult and harmful for an actor's body to play a play in which there is no idea, no solution, no style. In which, damn it, there is not a single truly funny joke, not a single worthwhile gag, just unwitty antics ". Marina Davydova (" Izvestia "): " I absolutely do not understand what Chusova is playing in the new Moscow Art Theater production. What is this? Stage comics? Why paint them with such oil paints? A theatrical extravaganza?... So why does it have a claim to a concept? Clownery?... But why isn't it so funny? Maybe a musical?... But then let them sing, or something. And not Moliere’s poems in a sonorous translation by Mikhail Donskoy, but some adaptation of the great text. Let it be something ."

The rich decorations of Anastasia Glebova and Vladimir Martirosov looked like a gilded carved box, all with doors and balconies, with a monogram portrait of the owner of the house. Pavel Kaplevich's costumes were bright and striped.

The long-legged grandmother Madame Pernel (Natalia Kochetova), in a short dress and stiletto heels, angrily left her son’s house, accompanied by a burly black man. The engine roared, spots of light from the headlights flashed, and she drove away. The sound of a car approaching - and the huge Orgon entered the door looking like a blue-striped Churchill, in a bowler hat and with a cigar. Under his arm was a Roman bust of Tartuffe wrapped in gold paper.

In fact, it seemed that everything had been invented - oh-ho-ho. For example, Kleant-Leontyev, all in green stripes and with the same striped suitcases, at first portrayed Agent 007. He wore dark glasses and, to the accompaniment of mysterious music in the semi-darkness, he laid out Tartuffe’s evidence into bags. Tartuffe himself looked like an obvious criminal - his stomach and arms were completely covered with tattoos, he surrounded himself with a retinue of a dwarf servant and two whore nuns and sang “Silence behind the Rogozhskaya Outpost” with a guitar. Elmira the doll (Marina Zudina) seduced Tartuffe in the pool, which looked like rows of open fans-waves, and before that, undressing behind a screen, she seductively hung pink panties and a bra on its edge. Behind the next screen Tartuffe was hanging striped panties and stockings. But all these inventively composed details - some funny, others vulgar - did not add up to anything. It’s as if Chusova, having come up with some trick, then forgot about it and took on a new one (just as she forgot that at the beginning of the play she appointed Cleanthe as a spy). But the most surprising discrepancy occurred in the finale. The soldiers who came to arrest Tartuffe in the name of the king turned out to be his own giggling retinue - a dwarf and nuns. Tartuffe was taken away, but it was clear to every spectator that this was a joke, that the swindler, of course, was free, which means Orgon was still in danger. But Chusova was no longer interested in such details - the plot of the play was finally abandoned for the sake of the wedding finale with everyone dressing up in white dresses and camisoles with hoops. A sparkling rain had already begun to fall, and everything turned into an extravaganza with a new fashion show of Kaplevich’s parody costumes.

Following Tartuffe, one of the so-called “ordinary” premieres appeared, which, nevertheless, promised to become interesting. The production of "The Revelation of Prince Kasatsky" was based on Tolstoy's "Father Sergius" at the Theater Workshop of Georgy Taratorkin. It was intriguing that the leading role was given to one of the best actors of the Youth Theater - Igor Gordin, the hero of Ginkas's "Lady with a Dog" and the recent "The Cherry Orchard" by Nyakrosius. Alexander Nazarov, an artist from Sovremennik, who has already staged several good performances in Moscow (the best, perhaps, was “Woyzeck” at the Drama Center with Siyatvinda in the title role), gave the play the subtitle “miracle without intermission.” Apparently, he meant not a miracle, but a miracle, like a medieval theatrical genre telling about Christian miracles. Otherwise, one cannot understand why, at the beginning, a child, coming on stage, rings the bell and announces: “The play is about Stepan Kasatsky!”, while the other characters in the play, giggling and jostling like schoolchildren, pretend that all this is not serious. Quite quickly it became clear that Nazarov was simply embarrassed to seriously follow the story of the prince’s spiritual transformation (we recently observed the same problem with the Presnyakov brothers, who staged “Resurrection”), and therefore all these games, stupid grins and pinching of the “classmates” standing nearby Tolstoy's plot never emerges. And the good actor Gordin in the famous Mozzhukhin-Bondarchuk role remains a comic bore. Was it worth it to fence the garden?

Another fashionable November premiere was the long-promised performance by Mark Zakharov, a favorite of the elite public. The production of Ostrovsky's play "The Last Sacrifice" in Lenkom was called " All-In " . Critics one after another wrote about the feverish dynamism of the performance, about the race that Zakharov made a metaphor for the present time, and recalled the last Lenkom production based on Ostrovsky - “The Sage” fifteen years ago, the main theme of which was the luxury and splendor of the times of “primitive accumulation of capital.” Now Oleg Sheintsis put rows of shiny lacquer carriages on stage, and behind him placed a rotating panorama of Moscow - this is the image of unstoppable movement and city crowd: it is not so easy for the heroes to squeeze between the wheels and doors in this traffic jam in order to go on stage.

The theme of love in such a situation, although it determines the plot, fades into the background. And indeed, if we recall the recent - leisurely and thorough - production of the same play at the Art Theater: there, when the young widow Yulia, played by Marina Zudina, had to leave her lover who had deceived her (this role was played by a handsome long-haired student of the Moscow Art Theater School) for the sake of a quiet life with a respectable millionaire (gray-haired Oleg Tabakov) - the difference between the men seemed very sensitive. Here, when Alexandra Zakharova must resolve the same dilemma, torn between the fussy forty-year-old Viktor Rakov and the fit, impossibly elegant and lazyly charming Alexander Zbruev , the situation does not seem so dramatic.

To me, I must say, what seems important and symptomatic is not the image that Mark Anatolyevich, sensitive to audience success, chose, but the way in which he dissected Ostrovsky’s play. The text, shortened by at least half, was overgrown with a huge number of Zakharov’s additions, or rather, the director’s gags. The characters constantly throw jokes into the audience that the author has never heard of, new characters appear (like a detachment of hot-headed abreks accompanying the obvious Caucasian Salai Saltanych, or Patti, who was discharged to Moscow by a millionaire for one evening). And all this in order to bring the century-old play closer to the present moment and the viewer. I am far from condemning any of this: both the reduction of classical texts and their addition. I am aware that theater is a completely independent art, and whoever needs a play can take a book from the shelf. We are talking only about why it is done and how the result relates to the original product. Here we go in a row: and “King Lear” is planed to the point that the plot breaks and goes to hell, not to mention the meaning. The poetic text of "Tartuffe" is so stuffed with cheap ad-libs that the poems cease to be poems, and the meaning of Moliere's main play shrinks and becomes primitive. And “The Last Victim” in “Lenkom” noticeably shredded it. But the texts are all great, “praised,” as they say, and over centuries of productions have acquired so many new meanings that the current refusal to “increase” these meanings is insensitive to them. But this refusal is harmful to us. And it says a lot about our time and theater.