Grigory Zaslavsky. Karbauskis at the Moscow Art Theater

Karbauskis at the Moscow Art Theater
"Old World Landowners" on the New Stage

Grigory Zaslavsky

Publication date: January 8, 2002

The New Year's week was rich in theatrical events, although it would seem that the New Year frees theater workers from responsibility: every premiere seems to be an optional addition to the New Year's table.

On the other hand, it is known that many families still follow traditions and go to the theater on the evening of December 31st. was played on the newly opened small stage of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater - it was called the New Stage It was for such people that the premiere of “Old World Landowners” . Young director Mindaugas Karbauskis, yesterday’s graduate of Pyotr Fomenko, proposed his essay based on Gogol’s story. An essay based on Gogol's story - this is how the genre of the hour-long performance is designated in the program. An hour of ten without an intermission is quite convenient for both the actors and the audience.

But a short performance, if it turns out to be a simple sketch on a given topic, can cause disappointment and even justifiable discontent among the audience. In the West, where there are many such hour-long and even fifty-minute performances, brevity is almost a necessary measure, since the directors put so many extreme, borderline emotions and events into fifty to sixty minutes that it is impossible to stand for more than an hour, your nerves will simply give out...

In "Old World Landowners" there is no special borderlineness, condensation of feelings or events. A calm, quiet life without special events, filled with food alone, seems to be empty gluttony... “The life of modest rulers is so quiet, so quiet that you forget for a minute and think that the passions, desires and restless creatures of the evil spirit that disturb the world are not at all do not exist and you saw them only in a brilliant, sparkling dream,” these Gogol lines are placed on the first page of the program, preceding the list of characters and performers.

In the new play of the Art Theater Afanasy Ivanovich is played by Alexander Semchev , who is heavily involved in the Moscow Art Theater repertoire, but is still better known for advertising beer. In the role of his beloved, his Baucis, in comparison, which Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol himself gives, is Polina Medvedeva . Around them, girls, young actresses and students of the Moscow Art Theater School are dancing in circles, running wild, and fluttering about. They mark the noisy fun of local youth.

In Karbauskis's performance there are many completely theatrical meanings and intra-theater content. Let's say, a fly that is spectacularly and funny caught by a house boy, wonderfully played by Nikita Zverev, the actor of "Snuffbox", is reminiscent not so much of the Little Russian summer as of the famous lazzi with a fly from the play "Harlecchino - the Servant of Two Masters" by Giorgio Strehler , which in the past year they played in Moscow as part of the World Theater Olympiad.

Some wonderful and human moments (like how Afanasy Ivanovich - Semchev, who had already sent his Pulcheria Ivanovna to rest, refuses to accept food from the hands of Yavdokha, looks past the food somewhere to the side, like a faithful dog, ready to endlessly wait for the owner and doesn’t even want to take their favorite food from someone else’s hands) while they get lost in a calm, skillfully designed theatrical game.