Dina Goder. Confusions and misfits

Confusions and misfits
Dina Goder

Publication date: May 16, 2005

There is very little left until the end of the season, and although it cannot be ruled out that we will still see one or two good performances, the extremely unsuccessful course of the current theatrical year cannot be reversed. Listing what you found interesting since September, you start thinking without bending even five fingers. And here’s what’s also symbolic: among those premieres that usually make up the list of the main events of the season - performances of famous theaters, where stars play, and the directors are fashionable directors - there are almost no performances that are intelligible, with a clear idea, developing consistently and explainably. Taking a play, whether new or classic, the directors create fog, fill the action with meaningful symbols and cunning puzzles, and leave the viewer perplexed: “what does this dream mean?” I'm not talking about straightforwardness, but about elementary clarity. It may be difficult to find a solution (although all this untying of knots and making guesses is a strange thing for art), but, you agree, there should be one?

The premieres of the first half of May fully confirm this consideration. As soon as the theater is important and has status, then keep your hands apart: you can’t understand anything, you just get annoyed. Only small and marginal - everything is much clearer and more complex.

Let's start with the important ones. The first here is Molière's " Don Juan and Sganarelle " at the Vakhtangov Theater of the famous confusion and mocker Vladimir Mirzoev, who returned to his favorite stage after briefly being the director-in-chief at the Stanislavsky Theater. The current performance (at the center of which, as always, is Maxim Sukhanov, who habitually portrays a brutal idiot) is again from the “just don’t ask questions” series. Since you still won’t be able to answer why some of the men here turned into women (instead of Guzman’s servant, a certain languid Mrs. Guzman comes out, and the hero’s father Don Luis turned into Dona Luisa’s mother), why Don Juan’s mother turned out to be mentally ill, pretending to be a giggling girl with a ball, then an old woman with gray hair. Why is the hero dressed in something Japanese, and Sganarelle, played by Evgeny Stychkin, in one of the episodes appears in a curly Pushkin wig with sideburns, why the peasant Pierrot is oligophrenic, and Elvira comes on stage with a noose around her neck and smears the hero with her blood. And so on.

Critics who wrote about this performance were equally unable to understand what was happening on stage, and were divided only between those who assumed that there was some meaning to this performance (even if it was difficult to grasp), and those who were I'm sure it's a waste of time to look for it. So Alena Karas in “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” says that “ Mirzoev, according to his old habit, obscures and hides the true meaning of what is happening on stage ,” and he (the meaning) is that “ the mother, and with her all the women of this myth "They embody the wrath of heaven. They are the true Commander. The mother embodies the very horror of the infantile, unmanly man that is so common in the modern world ." Oleg Zintsov from Vedomosti suggests that the “maternal” plot of the play, together with the severed prop head of the hero in the finale, rhymes in a non-trivial way with Federico Fellini’s classic short film “Toby Dammit” based on the novella by Edgar Poe; a death girl with an unbearably creepy smile and a ball in hands, the severed head of the hero in the finale. Mirzoev this time does not flaunt his erudition for nothing, but uses it strictly to the point "Marina Davydova from Izvestia believes that behind Mirzoev's fog lies " an attempt to present a hero of the new time, who fearlessly threw away all human supports (faith, tradition, social conventions), as a hero of the new century, a kind of New Ageist, looking for support not just in himself himself and his radio, but in a roughly understood and emasculated Eastern spirituality ." In contrast, Gleb Sitkovsky from Gazeta calls the reasons for all the director's whims " incomprehensible ," and Roman Dolzhansky from Kommersant amuses readers with an ironic search for meaning: " Here, let's say , in the second act, Evgeny Stychkin, playing Sganarelle, appears in Pushkin's makeup - curls and sideburns. Not finding more logical reasons, I decided that the director was simply reminding us that Pushkin also wrote a play about a seducer. But a more knowledgeable colleague explained that Mr. Stychkin had already portrayed a poet somewhere - either in a television advertisement or in a movie. However, this same colleague admitted that my version of the “find” is no less convincing ".

Perhaps there are only two moments in Vakhtangov’s “Don Juan” with which everyone was satisfied. The performance is accompanied by the ensemble "Hot Rod Blues Band" under the direction of the legendary Mikhail "Petrovich" Sokolov. So, when Sukhanov, wearing dark glasses, like Ray Charles, approaches the musicians at the end of the first and second acts and begins to sing in a real hoarse, sexy blues voice under Petrovich’s harmonica, an electric spark literally jumps through the hall. It’s worth hearing how Sukhanov, after a very boring scene with his mother, passionately says: “Sugar mama, sugar mama, sugar mama please come back to me.” Although it is possible that Gleb Sitkovsky is right when he writes : “... maybe it’s better to go on stage with this ?”

The next extremely confusing, and also ethically unclear work is a performance on the Other stage of Sovremennik under the long title “ Flight of the Black Swallow, or Episodes of History at an Angle of 40 Degrees .” The strange opus of middle-aged authors Pyotr Khotyanovsky and Inga Garuchava was staged by the relatively young Vladimir Ageev, who became famous for the ironic “Captive Spirits” at the Center for Drama and Direction, and then amazed everyone with the wild, supposedly “postmodernist” mess of Lermontov’s “Masquerade” at the “Satyricon”.

This time, the director’s extremely whimsical style was disastrously combined with a “phantasmagoric” play about the last days of Stalin, which itself turned out to be full of absurdities and suggestiveness. In it, a hole is formed in the heavens, and time stops, and insidious friends want to kill the leader with an overcoat with radioactive buttons (and thus turn his body into “cheese with holes”). Here Stalin marries a beautiful nurse, and saves gypsies by leading them out of his palace through a secret tunnel, and favors a Jewish tailor, and listens to curses from a priest (a former astrophysicist), and reads poetry of his own composition, and about how he was cursed Dad didn’t like women, he recalls with tears. All this bad dream is difficult to connect in the play with the leading actor, the star of the older generation of Sovremennik, Igor Kvasha, who, like just recently another sixties-era Sergei Yursky, wanted to personally deal with the bloody generalissimo.

Talking about this performance, critics recall: before the premiere, Igor Kvasha said on TV that his task, of course, was to debunk the tyrant and, if the audience sympathized with Stalin at least a little, the performance would be removed. As a result, we have to admit that, as Marina Zayonts writes in “Results”: “... for most of the performance we see a tired man, smart, deeply religious (he hides the icon of the Smolensk Mother of God from everyone), often and touchingly remembering his mother. An unhappy man ", whom no one really loved, but everyone was only afraid of. Well, I feel sorry for the old man, even though he is Stalin ." And Alena Karas from Rossiyskaya Gazeta finds that “ Stalin suddenly turns into almost the little man of classical Russian literature .” (To this it is worth adding one more amazing detail: Stalin here also quotes Chekhov’s conscientious Uncle Vanya, complaining that he could have become both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.) At the same time, most reviewers believe that Kvasha plays well, Marina Zayonts mentions that he is like " a faithful follower of the Stanislavsky system, who, let us recall, liked to say: “When playing the evil one, look for where he is good .” Karas calls his performance “gentle, soft, plastic”; Alexander Sokolyansky from Vremya Novostey believes that “ Kvasha’s task is not a caricaturist’s task, but an artist’s. He worked not on a cartoon, but on a portrait; he strived not for juiciness, but for accuracy .” But all this does not change the situation at all. The performance, perceived by the theater as a sharp and bold political gesture, almost a “warning to society” (it was not for nothing that the old contemporary guard was invited to the premiere: sixties liberals, writers and politicians, including Mikhail Gorbachev), turned out to be ethically ambiguous. In the pompous finale, when the red eyes of the devil light up in the background (hello to Chekhov again!), Stalin, who was almost a good-natured man before, suddenly thunders out a self-incriminating monologue, and then leaves for the opened hatch (read: the underworld). And again he leaves from there in a ceremonial uniform to the cheerful song: “Don’t be sad, don’t say goodbye, I’ll definitely come back.” This no longer causes alarm, but only amazement and laughter.

Next to the “status premieres”, whose directors believe that the intricate confusion is the complexity of thought, it is simply amazing how cleanly and clearly other poor theaters work. For example, Alexei Levinsky's "Theater" studio, which staged a small two-part play " The Table Period ", where, without special costumes and decorations, as during the "table" rehearsal period, they perform the ironic play of Vyacheslav Durnenkov "The Blue Car" and Blok's "Balaganchik". The ironic "Wagon", which has not yet been staged in Moscow, turned out to be especially entertaining. It contains a complete set of famous Soviet children's writers: Barto, Chukovsky, Marshak and Zakhoder, like a clip of Russian classics from Kharms, lead some kind of incongruous life, similar to a teenage pastime with drinking, parties, jokes, dancing in an empty apartment and the evening scaring of passers-by. They discuss the usual Sovpis topics (publishing orders, translations, business trips and meetings with readers) in boyish jargon, and when this text is played by Levinsky’s longtime actors, with their famous detached, slightly slow and gloomy manner, which gives weight to every little thing, it looks incredibly funny.

And also, when I talk about the marginalized, I mean student performances, which were initially doomed to a poor and short life. This season, the Gitis graduate course, led by Sergei Zhenovach , turned out to be one of the most diverse and productively developing theaters in Moscow. I call it a theater because the idea of ​​turning this acting and directing workshop into a theater has recently completely taken hold of its teachers and students and, judging by the persistence of both, there is hope that they will succeed. In any case, Zhenovach is already receiving offers to join the “big” theaters with his entire team as an autonomous studio. For now, he refuses such proposals, reasonably believing that in practice no autonomy will work, and the “children” will be scattered among extras in other people’s performances. And he dreams of getting a separate room for his theater, which already has a small repertoire.

I have already written about several performances from Zhenovach’s course, and recently they had another premiere, which, in my opinion, became one of the most successful in the repertoire. Student director Ulanbek Bayaliev staged a tender and simple-minded performance based on Ostrovsky's " Late Love ". The tightly twisted plot “from the life of the outback,” with love, devotion, deceit, gullibility and fearless vice mixed with nobility, is delivered so sincerely, with such openness, which you almost never see now. The charming young actors play as we would like Ostrovsky’s plays to be played at the Maly Theater - not weighed down by heavy tradition, but with ease and trust in every word. If in previous performances (especially in “The Boys” based on Dostoevsky, staged by Zhenovach) it seemed that in this course the young actors were stronger, then here the girls came out ahead. Even the heroine - a classic virtuous maiden who, it would seem, is impossible to imagine without boredom - Maria Shashlova plays with amazing quiet firmness, without melancholy, but on the contrary, beaming with love. Olga Kalashnikova turns the widow-seductress, usually painted in bold colors, into a fluttering and sly coquette with whom it is impossible to be angry for a long time. And Anastasia Imamova’s traditional busy and cunning mother turns out to be pretty and funny.

But speaking seriously, the point, of course, is not in specific performances of the course, some of which are more successful and others less so, and not even in the very desire of the acting and directing team not to part, which is also important. The fact is that this theater, which does not yet exist, has a development prospect that is not currently visible in any established troupe. Zhenovach’s course, accustomed to setting major goals for itself, sees necessity and meaning in development, which is rare in these days. This is already encouraging in the end of the sour season.