Self-revelation session

The theater festival “Baltic House” was held in St. Petersburg

The 20th anniversary “Baltdom” lasted for three whole weeks. It began on September 20 in Moscow with the presentation of the festive program. The main program, St. Petersburg, began with Nyakroshusov’s “Othello,” which is not the first time they have brought it here and is loved to the point of oblivion.

This year’s festival list of performances was truly impressive, but for Muscovites, who had already seen a lot, the most important things were located in the first and last days of the show. The main attraction of the beginning of the festival was the grandiose performance of the Polish classic Krystian Lupa “Marilyn” - the first part of the triptych “Persona” he conceived. We wrote about this production, dedicated to the last days of Marilyn Monroe’s life, a year and a half ago in a report from Wroclaw, where Lupa, receiving a European theater award, showed his many hours of impressive “sketch” (see “Vremya Novostei” of April 8, 2009). In the spring, this play “The Golden Mask” promises to be brought to Moscow as part of a large Polish project. The festival ended with a production by another European celebrity - the Belgian Luc Perceval, who was bringing his performances to St. Petersburg for the fourth time, but had never been to Moscow. Perceval, who since last season has become the chief director of the famous Hamburg theater "Thalia", brought his version of Gorky's "Children of the Sun". A few days before, the premiere of Andrei Zholdak’s play “Moscow - Cockerels” based on Venedikt Erofeev was played at the festival. The main Ukrainian provocateur and esthete staged a play with the Baltic House theater troupe. And the five-hour performance that he showed should probably also be considered a sketch for now, which will continue to change and will probably become shorter.

The main intrigue in Zholdak's performance was that the role of Venichka was played by 62-year-old Vladas Bagdonas, Nyakrosius's favorite actor, his powerful, taciturn Othello and gloomy Hamlet-father. It was difficult to imagine that the gloomy, gray-bearded Bagdonas would appear in the role of a restless drunkard and an eloquent philosopher, but those who know Zholdak did not expect that the director would compose a performance that would somehow match our impressions of Erofeev’s poem. Those who wanted to see the authentic “Cockerels” gradually left the hall, and by the third act the theater was at least half empty. Those who came specifically “to see Zholdak” seemed to be impressed by his new visionary experiments - there was plenty of applause at the end.

It is difficult to evaluate a performance now that is definitely not ready. But according to my assumptions, no matter how you collect it or squeeze out the excess - into a series of Zholdakov’s successes, in which there was always a certain, if not ideological, then figurative integrity and powerful energy - it will not stand up. It is very fragmentary, disheveled, inarticulate, rushing in all directions at the same time. “Cockerels” begins with a long picture of a thunderstorm on the shore of a rag sea. For the first half hour, not a single word is uttered on stage - only the house’s windows shine, a giant eye blinks in the round porthole screen, thunder rumbles and the stage attendants wave rag waves. Looking at their painful physical training, you inevitably begin to think that in our theater the cheapest thing is labor, and that in some German theater they would probably come up with some simple mechanism to wave rags up and down. In addition to the sea, there is also a piece of an inclined pavilion on the side of the stage, where three girls are doing something whimsical, there is a stuffed fox, in whose ear everyone is saying something in a loud, inaudible whisper, there is Venichka in two faces - Bagdonas and his vulgar double, there is forever a drunken angel aunt, another angelic girl in white and working men. All of them, during the first two actions, constantly perform some incomprehensible body movements and meaningful passes with their hands, the light comes on and goes out, the eye looks, thunder roars. In the third act, Venichka-Bagdonas suddenly grows a long Grandfather Frost-like beard and looks like a sly sly man, Erofeev’s text becomes much larger and, although in this performance he looks like a student skit, the remaining audience noticeably perks up. Those who like to interpret Zholdakov signs will probably be able to tell a lot about what each of them symbolizes, but in general, I won’t undertake to explain what this dream means. And the only thing, in my opinion, that was worth attention in this crazy action was the acting existence of Vladas Bagdonas, who managed, having found himself in an alien world, as if on another planet, to maintain his internal rhythm and core, and not fall into vanity and significance. And at some moments his presence on stage made sense of something to which without him it was impossible to ascribe any meaning.

Luc Perceval's Hamburg performance, on the contrary, was extremely clear. Since we saw Perceval's Othello, Death of a Salesman and especially Uncle Vanya at Baltdom, we know that this director always completely rewrites and greatly abridges the classic text, making it extremely sharp and modern. With “Children of the Sun” he acted even more radically - he did not just shorten the text, he left in the play only those conversations of Gorky’s senseless intellectuals that concerned their relationships with each other and with life. And he turned the performance into a group psychological training session. No action - only conversations, confessions, breaks, hysterics, self-exposure, tears.

We immediately understand what awaits us: actors in modern suits sit in a row on a bench in front of us, and one of them hastily answers the phone that he is busy, he has a group, that one lady is in love with the leader of the group, and the other... And then Gorky's conversations begin. Behind the backs of the group members, a giant roll of paper is slowly wound from one reel to another and an old woman in black uses a large brush to paint pictures with Russian signatures on this moving backdrop - houses, food, crosses. People draw something like this when they see a psychotherapist.

Gorky's play, in which for Russian directors the central scene was always the cholera riot, and the main thing was everything that separated the self-occupied, worthless intelligentsia and the plebeians attacking it, suddenly lost this confrontation. We don’t know which of the people who came to this session are taller or lower, it’s only about them - their strength and weakness, pressure and timidity, intelligence and stupidity, desire to help or isolate themselves. They sit in front of the audience and talk to them as if they were talking to other participants in the séance - the lights in the hall never go out completely. To get involved in this performance, you need unflagging attention to each of the characters - this is not easy, since you have to constantly read the verbose translation captions. Because of this, the attention sometimes wanders and Children of the Sun seems a more rational and less passionate production of Perceval than previous ones. But be that as it may, this smart performance shakes things up, it gives you the opportunity to look at things that have long been familiar and boring in a new way. And it turns out that Gorky’s unloved, rather average social play speaks about the painful, important, today. And this, perhaps not the best performance of Perceval, could not be missed.

Dina GODER