| The Chekhov Moscow Art Theater staged a play by the Presnyakov brothers While the audience is taking their seats, a young man Valya (student of the Moscow Art School-Studio Pyotr Kislov) lies on the bed, tossing and turning under the sheet. The lights go out; and the audience begins to see the nightmares that torment the young man. His dead father's head appears on the television; then this father (Vitaly Khaev) comes out of the white, white wall in a white, white captain’s jacket. On TV and “live” (if one can say so about a dream), the father expresses himself in mockingly stylized Shakespearean verses and tells his son that he was poisoned by his wife and brother. “Playing the Victim,” a play by the Presnyakov brothers, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov.
The young man has an interesting job - he participates in investigative experiments. On it, people who killed their relatives and friends show exactly how they did it. What is important here is that - family and friends. In the three “episodes” presented in the play, there are no contract killings or gang warfare. A nervous henpecked man who pushed his wife, who was wiping the glass, out of the window. A touching oriental man who drowned his mistress who cheated on him with his older brother. A thirty-year-old car wash owner, at a high school reunion, driven to the brink by the ridicule of a richer classmate. What in police slang is usually called “everyday work” and which improves the detection rate statistics - in contrast to professional “ordering”. Everyday life, everyday life, everyday life - and the Presnyakov brothers know how to hear and reproduce this daily life, its everyday horror. They hear how, in passing, mother (Marina Golub) threatens to send Valya to a psychiatric hospital. Just so that it doesn’t interfere with arranging your personal life. And how the murderer husband screams in response to the investigator’s question (“and she offered you to take out the bucket?”) - “This is a family! No one here offers anyone anything!”
But anyone who considers the performance “dark” or “gloomy” would be mistaken. The program indicates the genre - “comedy”, and the audience laughs for two hours. He laughs, recognizing the language. Characters. Situations. No, it’s not like every viewer has a corpse in their biography. It’s just that the Presnyakov brothers take typical situations to an extreme resolution. And Serebrennikov turns every scene into an attraction.
The best of the attractions is the appearance in the pool (where the round and sad Zakirov - the wonderful role of Igor Zolotovitsky - drowned his mistress) of two men in black swimsuits, the same caps and glasses; on her feet are women's shoes. They depict synchronized swimming on land and protect the surface of the water (indicated by a blue backdrop) from the encroachments of the hero who did not take a change of swimming trunks with him. The police officers who need to conduct an investigative experiment are not under orders. They see everything that happens next to the precious pool, even when they are not on stage. They are omnipresent and indifferent to people. They are the gods of this completely godless world. Disgusting, arrogant and homerically funny gods. Well, what is the world like...
The Mkhat actors, in a performance that appeals more to the “Tagankovsky” tradition than to the “Mkhat” (“performance” rather than “experience”), play as one brilliantly - and best of all, perhaps, Alla Pokrovskaya in the role of an employee of a Japanese restaurant, whom the owner ordered to portray “an elderly Japanese woman with destiny.” Something like a red kimono, a black wig - and exactly the captured manner of speaking and moving of an older Russian woman, one of the good saleswomen.
Before the release of the play, there was a lot of talk in theater circles about the fact that the play contained an obscene monologue. Indeed, there is: a police captain conducting investigative experiments breaks down at the last one and begins to marvel out loud at what kind of nonsense people can kill each other over. Vitaly Khaev, who got this role along with the role of the hero's father, diligently - but not very convincingly - pronounces all the words that a policeman could utter in such a situation. It could - no doubt about it. 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. Enough so that the audience can imagine it. And this monologue could have been written simply in Russian, and not in obscene Russian - by the way, the former has more freedom.
But in the world of this performance there is no freedom. The point is not that the heroes (those under investigation) are constantly being led around in handcuffs. The fact is that Denmark is a prison. And the customs and vocabulary there are prison-like. Freedom is just an impossible and vulgarly expressed dream of the sea. Naval songs are a symbol of freedom. Everyone - living and dead - lined up in their uniforms and sang in chorus at the end. There is suffering. There is no redemption. And there will be no Fortinbras. Anna GORDEEVA |
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