| "Azazel" came to life on stage So, let's take it in order. The Central Youth Theater staged a play - not bad and not good. Normal. Children's. If I were twelve years old, I probably would have liked it. And what - an exciting plot, a charming hero, love-carrots in place, romance in abundance. All literary reminiscences—both obvious (“Poor Liza” by Karamzin) and disguised (“The Idiot” by Dostoevsky)—are discarded. For example, the fatal beauty Amalia Bezhetskaya (Irina Nizina) is not Nastasya Filippovna? And the passionate Zurov (excellent work by Ilya Isaev) is not Rogozhin? But the creators of “Erast Fandorin” (the stage name of “Azazel”) clearly did not care about all this. The events of B. Akunin's novel are retold in Fandorin clearly, consistently, without formalist frills, conceptual bells and whistles and other production fog, to which director Alexei Borodin always preferred simple clarity. (For which, in fairness, he takes the place of artistic director of TsAMT.)
Recently another “Azazel” was released on television. For adults. It turned out worse. (See "Vremya Novostei" dated March 12.) The authors of the television film were looking for a cinematic equivalent to Akunin's ornateness - and did not find it. The film turned out to be pretentious, long and completely undynamic. Which is disastrous for a detective - even the most thoughtful one. It’s much better like this - simple and without pretensions. It is immediately clear that Akunin’s novel, if allusions and paraphrases are erased from it, turns into children’s adventure literature and as such wins over itself as an outpost of advanced literature.
And if Akunin hadn’t been Akunin, we could have limited ourselves to short information about what has become one more decent children’s performance in Moscow. But no. You’ll be limited here when posters announcing the May premiere of “Fandorin” were posted around the city in the winter, when the leading publications had long since entered into an absentee competition with each other in prompt and extensive coverage of the upcoming premiere, when publicists, poets, and wives came to the performance poets and wives' friends are interested in finding out from each other the names of the artists involved in Fandorin, and interviews with the recent graduate of the Shchepkinsky School, Pyotr Krasilov, who played the main role, are already being published in glossy magazines.
Of course, an honest desire to stage a simple play for children in the case of “Azazel” is much more appropriate than the pathetic attempts of the creators of the television film to correspond to the postmodern spirit of Akunin’s work. But the naivety of naivety is discord. There is a yawning abyss between the cunning of the Oberiut, who writes poetry “for children,” and the ineptitude of the child himself, who composes awkward verses. And I cannot guarantee that the naivety of the staging techniques in Borodin’s performance is always reflected. Sets on wheels, false beards, background characters “basking in the roles,” fireworks instead of explosions and running in place instead of a chase - this whole anthology of theatrical routine, well tailored, neatly sewn, decorated here and there with frills and frills of acting, rather indicates the opposite . Okay. In other conditions one could turn a blind eye to all this. During the rush, I want to open them.
The point, I repeat, is not the quality of the performance - it could have been worse or better, but the discrepancy between a real cultural event and the hype raised around it. After all, there is no event - if we consider what happened according to the Hamburg account - there is no. There is a clever PR move, and if Borodin had staged it in the same naive manner of Dickens or Dumas, it would have been peace and quiet. By the way, he did, and where, one wonders, were the newspapers with glossy magazines? Yes, in the same place as now. Fandorin is not just a performance. This is a promotion. “The world premiere of B. Akunin’s novel” is called.
And if the quietest and most intelligent artistic director of RAMT, who had not previously been noted for his ability to keep his nose to the wind, realized that repertoire policy is more important than aesthetics, that the correct packaging of a product is more important than its quality, that a game can be made even before the players enter the field, then , something has finally changed in the very composition of cultural life, and a work of art, in addition to everything that from time immemorial should have contained a work of art, must now certainly have one more quality. This quality could conventionally be called “marketability.” I recently went into a bookstore, looked around and distinguished among the endless rows of books individual ones with signs “Best sales in March” emblazoned on them. Alexandra Marinina, Oksana Pushkina, Patrick Zyuskind and Evgeniy Grishkovets are selling well. Well, Harry Potter, of course. And what do they have in common? Where is the coolly intellectual Süskind, and where is the tear-jerking Pushkin? There is something in common. All this can become a commodity. Or they wanted to make all this a commodity. And there are other authors - non-commercial ones. And so it is everywhere. For an advanced exhibition curator, turn-of-the-century Russian avant-garde and Stalin-era painting are equally commodities. And it’s not that the curator is a fool and doesn’t see the difference between Filonov’s canvases and Yar-Kravchenko’s painting “A.M. Gorky reads I.V. Stalin, V.M. Molotov and K.E. Voroshilov’s fairy tale “The Girl and Death”. Of course he sees. But, if you please, he has a different paradigm. It has nothing to do with the quality of art.
Of course, before there was a gap between reader demand and the quality of literature, audience attention and the quality of painting, public interest and the quality of performances. But now it is no longer a break. These are two unrelated realities. Bad art can sell well, or it can sell poorly. Good can be bad or good. Because there has been no bad and good art for a long time. There are commodity and non-commodity. And “Erast Fandorin” is, of course, a product. And, of course, it will sell well. And reviews, laudatory or scolding, cannot influence this, of course. And, apparently, we need to come to terms with this. But it's difficult. Marina DAVYDOVA |
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