Translated material
From the life of losers
The Baltic House festival ended with the performance of the Persiana Luke “The Death of the Communist Party” Belgian director Luke Perseval in Moscow with his performances has never arrived even once, but in St. Petersburg at the Baltic House festival, it appears regularly. This 50 -year -old Flemish is one of the most significant values in today's European theater. This time, he showed at the Baltic House festival a performance based on Arthur Miller's play “The Death of the Communications and the Committee”. And although this production of the Berlin Theater “Shaubune” was not as strong as the performances of the Perseval “Othello” and “Uncle Vanya” who had previously arrived at the festival, most Russian directors can only envy such talented failures. A distinctive feature of Perseval is a radical and at the same time a careful shake of classic texts. In his own way, shoeing the plays of Shakespeare and Chekhov, the director, not ceremony, adapted the dialogues of the characters today, but this did not affect the architectonics of the text. Cosmetic repairs were made, excess furniture was carried out, but all the supports and partitions remained in their places. The play “The Death of the Commander”, written by American Arthur Miller, was also subjected to approximately the same operations, only clarifying the author’s plan, shortly after the end of World War II.
The first thing the viewer sees before the start of the performance is a heavy middle -aged body drowned in the couch. An extensive beer belly, a stretched T -shirt, a dull look - this is a salesman whose witnesses to whose death we will soon become. A dry old woman with a clogged gaze spread in the next chair, which at the end of the performance can begin to be called the widow of the commander. One glance at them is enough to say: this is a family of losers. One of the main participants in the play will be a TV installed on the stage, at which each time the eyes of the characters at those moments when they have nothing to say. And there are many such moments.
Surpically pressing on the remote control and jumping through the channels, Willy Lomen recalls his whole long life and does not find any reflection in it. After 36 years of immense service to the glory of the God of commerce, he was fired, and there is no longer any prospects ahead. Once in his youth, he and the late brother dreamed of going to the jungle, but did not do this, preferring freedom to the modest earnings of the salesman. Now, instead of the jungle, he is surrounded by tubs with ficuses, and the ghost of Ben’s deceased, then the sons who, having reached a decent age, were not able to please themselves or their parents from this impassable thicket. “Life has disappeared,” almost every character of this performance could repeat after Voikhitsky from the Chekhovsky “Uncle Vanya”.
When making an overview of the unfulfilled human hopes, the director shows us a flashed bodies in non -stale linen and extinct eyes. Perseval proves to the viewer that the “death of a salesman” is the history of the degeneration of not just one family, but of the entire Western civilization. “Who will live in this house? - At some point, Willy throws his wife bitterly with bitterness. "Gastarbaists?" In Miller’s play, the hero committed suicide so that children could get insurance for him, but Persianal refuses such a finale that, with a well-known stretch, can be called a happy end. The current Willy Lomenus, unlike the Millerovsky commander, has no strength even for suicide. He just forever grows in the sofa on which he spent almost all the best years of his life at the TV. Lies and dies. And, having surrounded his body at these quiet funerals, one of his sons states: "He was a goat." According to Perseval, neither this commander nor our civilization, nor our civilization, deserved the best epitaphs.
