Dmitry Tsilikin. Grishkovets crept up unnoticed

Grishkovets crept up unnoticed
The first festival of theater winners of the national theater award "Golden Mask" has ended in St. Petersburg. Among the imported - non-Petersburg - products, the main artistic event was the play "How I Ate the Dog" by Evgeniy Grishkovets.

Dmitry Tsilikin

Date of publication: September 26, 2000

A certain actor said that, while still studying at the institute, he played at the Lensovet Theater in the same play with Alisa Freindlich - and every time he was amazed at how, in a strictly defined place, at a certain line, tears began to flow from her eyes. And then - this is what this actor said approximately - I worked and realized that everything was simple: she was free. If I am free, I can cry, laugh, hiccup, or do anything on stage.

In fact, studying in our drama schools almost always comes down to a process of liberation. For four (or more) years, people get used to behaving “like in real life” when they go out onto an illuminated dais in front of a large crowd of people. That is, “don’t clamp down.” And Stanislavsky’s “The Actor’s Work on Himself” contains many stories (which now look quite comical) about how a wise teacher spied a clamp in the back of a student, then in the neck, then in the big toe of the left foot.

All this is based on a generally correct premise: any person feels awkward when many strangers look at him at once. And not even strangers: each of us is given the opportunity to be the main character of a public situation: at our own wedding, at the funeral of “first-line” relatives, etc. - few people feel natural and unconstrained in such a role.

Therefore, the profession of an actor - a person for whom this fear does not exist - is surrounded by some kind of almost mystical aura. Actors are some special people, not like us. Praise: “He plays - well, just like in life!” - contains a respectful recognition that the actor, unlike us, knows how to publicly present the most seemingly simple things that we, nevertheless, would not easily show to the people, even though we do them in private every minute.

And this is what modern acting almost always comes down to. There are, of course, rare talents endowed with the amazing ability to seem to become a different person, the creative power to break the boundaries of oneself, to penetrate into areas of inner life hidden from them outside the stage (such was, for example, Innokenty Smoktunovsky ). However, usually we are dealing with an external representation of someone who is not me, the actor, but whom I represent. Again, there are rare masters of performance, and their art is quite virtuoso, but they are just rare. Otherwise, the theater has long been dominated by a crude demonstration of craft techniques and tricks, the ability to break off things, howl protractedly and wave a tinsel mantle (as Pushkin put it).

This triumph is fully supported by the public: if only we didn’t go to horrific enterprise (essentially, regardless of the form of organization of the theatrical enterprise) performances, the entire artistic meaning of which boils down to a wink: they say, you saw me in the movies (or, even cooler, in advertising) - enterprises would have gone bankrupt long ago. A fair portion of the public supports our moth-eaten flabby stars and newly minted stars, young and arrogant, in the confidence that they are not just people, but the chosen ones who managed to express this and that “in their creativity.”

It seems that the revelry of lies, falsehood and shamelessness has finally exhausted the patience of some theatrical gods - and to the destruction of ballet dolls, gossip imaginaries, they gave birth to Grishkovets.

Much has already been said well about the Kaliningrad playwright, director and actor Evgeny Grishkovets . And it's all true. But not all of it.

Or maybe not entirely true - at least in its representation. He is not an actor at all - in the sense that we mean by this word. But he showed: in order to go on stage and be interesting, in order to hold the attention of a full hall for an hour and a half, it is not at all necessary to be an actor. Moreover, you simply don’t need to be like most of the current actors who are vying for this attention. Because spending an hour and a half with “mature masters” and “favourites of the public” is not at all interesting - their playing techniques have been studied to the smallest detail, and they are not able to tell you anything personally important and necessary due to their spiritual and mental emptiness.

But what is Grishkovets doing?

Grishkovets performs his own play “How I Ate the Dog.” The booklet quotes one of the critical assessments: “A completely new dramaturgy.” This is also not true. If you wish, you can find many predecessors for it - from “Notes from the Underground” ( Dostoevsky , by the way, was also a fair reader of his works) to Yevgeny Kharitonov and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (cf.: “I walk on the ground below me, a box with neighbors on the side below in front of the windows everything is built up all around, everything is built up and the metro is underground, there is no free air among the wires" - Kharitonov; "And then we approached, after all, there is not one person, people are not animals. Still, we didn’t really dislike you, after all, it was. There’s something about you, beautiful eyes, that coat” - Petrushevskaya; “Well, I mean... or something... But on the other hand, why complain... A lot of people just don’t have that in my life. there will be... And it’s not even necessary at all... But there’s no home..." - Grishkovets). So the “Golden Mask” in the “Innovation” nomination is fair as an assessment not of literary novelty, but of theatrical novelty.

So what is he doing anyway?

He sits on stage and tells stories about serving as a sailor in the Pacific Fleet, interspersing them with all kinds of colorful rubbish from the Flemish school, the monotonous noise of life, as well as plastic jokes and gags. Music is also some kind of sound slag, and Grishkovets himself is not an elite breed, the results of the selection of one of the hundreds of applicants “to be an actor” are not visible in him. That's why you immediately begin to love him.

Because he not only does not have the smug peacock acting habits, there is no artificial “operatic” voice, there are no heartbreaking outbursts of motor temperament, there is no whoreness characteristic of the theater - but he is the opposite of this with all his nature. Pavel Aleksandrovich Markov wrote in 1924: “The art theater most fully brought the actor, stage and theater closer to life; it looked for new means of stage expression in real life.” Over the hundred years that have passed since Stanislavsky’s discoveries, the Russian theater had to become disgusted, lie and become dirty so that finally real life again became the source of new means of stage expression.

People showed up who, apparently, had not been told in childhood that the stage (or camera) is scary, that one should be afraid of it a priori, and they are not afraid of anything like that. As a result, the most interesting acting creations of recent years do not belong to professional actors. The roles of Renata Litvinova, combining the sharpest expressiveness with absolute psychological authenticity and intelligibility, seem to be a direct reincarnation of Meyerhold's theater. The crushing organic nature of Sergei Bodrov Jr. makes his heroes much more convincing than the fruits of the efforts of the “masters”. Finally, Grishkovets. The stage image he creates (just like the cinematic images of Bodrov and Litvinova) is “me in the proposed circumstances.” He does not pretend that he is some completely different guy, and does not indulge in self-demonstration - he is engaged in what E.S. Kalmanovsky called self-knowledge in creative activity in “The Book on the Theater Actor.”

In general, it turns out that we sit, without getting bored, the whole evening alone with one single person, not because he is somehow particularly skilled in acting, and not because he is telling something terribly detective-exciting, and not because that cinema and television fame is following him. No, everything is simpler: “I am in the proposed circumstances”, it is interesting when the boundaries of this “I” are wide enough.

The fact that Grishkovets plays a text he himself wrote also gives his tales additional depth and additional shades (like M.M. Zhvanetsky’s best performance - the author’s). He is deprived of another of the inherent qualities of an actor - stupidity (exceptions here only confirm the general order of things). But he is endowed with qualities that, generally speaking, serve as a criterion for an actor’s professional suitability, but are found on stage a little more often than intelligence: musicality, an impeccable sense of rhythm, which determine both the general structure of the performance and the accuracy of the intonation pattern of each phrase.

And, most importantly, I repeat: he is free. In Europe and America, which have succeeded much before us in terms of establishing human dignity, the idea of ​​art as a product produced by anyone who decides to engage in this art has long been established (in particular, dance - any movements, even those of spiny paralytics, the latter will announce these movements as contemporary dance; and, in turn, contemporary art - any crap conceptually smeared on the canvas or, even better, right on the floor of the museum). All this, of course, is a regurgitation of the process of personal emancipation. In our country, fortunately, this process has not gone that far (it hasn’t even come close yet), and no one has canceled the traditional criteria for the quality of performances and acting. But it turned out that accuracy, expressiveness, artistry (properties, generally speaking, often found outside the theater - they are the essence of the virtues of any good storyteller), when brought to the stage, in themselves create theater - all you need to do is not be afraid of the stage. And real content, which has genuine support in real life, is found outside the theater and even more often than in it.