Translated material
Tyranny of suffixes
“Gentlemen Golovlevs” on the Small Stage of the Moscow Art Theater
Of the 14 actors involved in “The Golovlev Gentlemen,” nine have already worked with director Kirill Serebrennikov. Alla Pokrovskaya in “The Bourgeois” and in “Playing the Victim”, Evgenia Dobrovolskaya in “The Bourgeois” and “Forest”, Alexey Kravchenkov in the same “Bourgeois”, and before that in “Candid Polaroids”. Young people - Maria Zorina, Yulia Chebakova, Sergei Medvedev, Eduard Chekmazov, Yuri Chursin - are involved here and there, in the classics, and in the works of the Presnyakov brothers... It’s hard to say whether this is the dream-team of director Serebrennikov or his choice this time is dictated by the instinct of self-preservation. “Gentlemen Golovlevs” is the territory where Serebrennikov first meets Yevgeny Mironov. Such an important acquaintance does not imply optional distractions.“Golovlevs”, like “Bourgeois” and “Les”, are decorated in the “vintage” style: manual meat grinders, an overhead projector, an aluminum trough under the table, on the table - antediluvian “underwood”. The sons of Judas, Volodya and Peter, as well as their cousins, orphans Anninka and Lyubinka, are disfigured by the vile Soviet-era school uniform, gray blouses and brown dresses (the mere memory makes you itch). Serebrennikov is not concerned about keeping up with the times; he needs the spirit of the era, or rather, its stuffiness. The stuffiness is recognizable, painfully familiar, sickeningly familiar. Not antiques that the public will look at with curiosity, but natural garbage and trash. Scenographer Nikolai Simonov and director Serebrennikov drag various junk from the dustbin of history and poke it in the viewer’s nose: just because you have modernized everyday life, this does not mean that the past is over.
A rusty mailbox is screwed to a shabby post. The epistolary genre has a sacred meaning in the Golovlev family. Initially, Porfiry even tells his brothers - the curly-haired klutz Stepan (Eduard Chekmazov) and the tongue-tied blockhead Pavel (Aleksey Kravchenko) exactly how dearest mother should write the most sensitive tsidulki. The first Russian structuralist knows the power of words, knows how to round off a phrase so that you can’t catch it, and hide behind it from all sides. He is logical as much as he is heartless. Judas is an understatement. Satan girl. Mama Arina Petrovna (Alla Pokrovskaya), who at the end of the first act desperately exclaims: “Is it really like this for everyone?!”, referring to family matters, may not turn to the “Hour of Judgment.” From a legal point of view, Porfisha is absolutely clean. But Arina Petrovna needs to go straight to Doctor Kurpatov. Solve the problem of family Golovlev suggestibility. They cannot resist Porfiry, he hypnotizes them, bewitches them. It seems like vanity, verbiage, but people are no longer able to distinguish where is up, where is down, where is right, where is left.
On the stage they scatter peas, chew sugar, and pinch crumbs made from rye bricks. Just as the Golovlevs had only rudimentary gestures left from the sign of the cross - one wave or one and a half strokes, so their “Our Father” was reduced to a request for their daily bread. In all its forms. They will receive grace with capital, and earth, and cabbage, and asparagus. And as for “let go” there, “don’t enter” or “get rid of” - it’s automatic.
The diminutive suffixes emitted by Judas seem like something material, sticky, and cobweb-like. The molasses scoundrel, the quiet-voiced Jesuit, the unctuous clown Porfiry Golovlev and God are hoping to speak. Like, if he prays well and quietly, in peace and harmony, then God will only have to throw up his hands and reward Judas according to his own, Judas’, understanding. Just to unhook the bath leaf...
“Clouds” are suspended from ropes with heavy laundry knots. It's raining in the village of Golovlevo. And in Dubrovin. And in Pogorelka. If it's not rain, it's snowstorms. In the second act, the knots will fall on the stage like snowdrifts. Under every hill is a grave. Judas built his altar on his own bones. First he will wrap you up and drive you into the coffin, and then he will serve the funeral service, honor with honor. Judas practices non-resistance to goodness through violence. It corrodes goodness from the inside, merges with it, mimics it.
This performance has a strange hypnotic power, turning even its own imperfections to its advantage. If the staging had been done “in Rozov’s style,” carefully and academically, if Mironov-Judushka had been spoken of: “Outstanding work!.. a great artist!..”, “Gentlemen Golovlevs” would have moved away from the realm of life into the realm of aesthetics. It seems to me that it is more interesting for Kirill Serebrennikov to remain alive than to push himself from the left flank into the Russian theatrical metro system. His talent is already obvious, but besides that, something else is obvious: he read the novel with a caring eye, fell ill with this terrible thing and expelled his pain onto the stage - chaotically, feverishly, sincerely. In Serebrennikov itself, Judushka is not worth a penny.
“Golovlevs,” released in a chamber space, are extremely specific. A pure family saga. We can say that the science of eugenics is triumphant on the stage: in the union of the drunken, foul-mouthed Golovlev Sr. and the loveless Arina Petrovna, ill-fated children were born, unviable, defective in body and spirit. The gene for depravity on the father's side and the gene for mental dullness on the mother's side were combined in the verbal pervert Judushka. Arina Petrovna is funny with her belated curse: isn’t she the root cause of everything? And what is the use of cursing one son if the whole family has long been cursed?
From generation to generation, the Golovlevs do not take care of their children, so the dead in the clan are increasing, and the living are becoming fewer and fewer. This topic is extremely important for Serebrennikov, and therefore - for clarity, and not for the sake of horror - dead men darned with white thread, including two suicides, a boy and a girl, walk around the stage. The monstrosity of this ordinary, everyday cannibalism did not dissolve, was not lost among the director’s spectacular inventions. In “The Golovlevs” there is banter, and absurdity, and insert numbers, but the performance turned out to be almost worse than the book. The last Jewish kiss is the kiss of incest. Anninka (Evgenia Dobrovolskaya), helplessly prostrate in front of her relative, conjures herself and us: “Good uncle, kind, kind!..” In fact, here, on the highest note, the end is put. And Judas’s momentary repentance and his quick, sweet repose in the common graveyard, under a sheet, is so that the viewer is a little relieved. So that he does not suffocate from the obvious thought: there will be no other kind uncle. Make peace with who you are.