| What the Chekhov Festival told us about Summing up the results of the festival and discussing its general theatrical meaning is an activity that is as exciting as it is risky. There are always few significant performances that allow us to draw some conclusions and make calculations: good if there are five or six, happiness if there are ten. Any work by a great master that, for one reason or another, was not included in the program (just as Bob Wilson’s “Woyzeck” was not included in the Fifth Chekhov Festival) could have changed the picture. Any statement requires careful qualifications: judging by what I saw, as far as I understand, it seems that, etc. - let's say them for future use and not forget them as the conversation progresses.
The situation is complicated by the fact that today’s humanities scholars are mostly hostile to the search for metaplots and general meanings (and at the same time to the general meanings themselves). Talking about the meaning or trends of theatrical development in connection with the Chekhov Festival has already been called “a dubious activity” (Kommersant) and “intellectual masturbation” (Izvestia). The contemptuous harshness is not at all strange: funny as it may seem, we have before us one of the most stable trends in pan-European thinking: not fashion, but dominance.
Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh, rector of the London Cathedral, a man of amazing destiny and even more amazing fortitude, in the early 70s complained about Anglican theologians: they talk a lot about language, grammar, the reliability of certain lists and very little -- about the essence of the Gospel (conversation in Moscow, published in the magazine “Iskusstvo Kino”, 1994, No. 5). He gave an example: an Orthodox student at a theological seminar in London spoke about the Resurrection of Christ, and the professor answered her: “Don’t sabotage the meeting!” When she confirmed that she believed in the Resurrection literally, she was expelled from the seminar: the professor, apparently, quite sincerely considered talking about the foundations of faith a taboo subject or a waste of time. Over thirty years, the mentality has spread, it does not surprise anyone - but the idea becomes truly influential precisely when “...raising the cry of the impudent, it produces in the journal polemics what has long been known to everyone” (Baratynsky). It cannot be refuted by arguing on specific grounds, but it is necessary to argue nonetheless.
The rejection of “general meanings” in theatrical art results, first of all, in extreme attention to self-sufficient detail. Pasternak’s “almighty god of details” has absolutely nothing to do with it, there is no need to remember him. Almighty, excuse me, who? - collectors of trifles will ask and in their own way they will be right. Their findings are very impressively present in the artistic construction, but they do not speak about anything other than themselves. They are not oriented towards any reality other than the present, directly recorded one.
“Why talk about the end of the world? After all, in fact, now is an intertemporal period. Well, you have to somehow try to preserve the smallest details...” says Christophe Marthaler, a favorite of advanced European theatergoers. It's hard to believe the director when he adds, "...to understand how things will turn out next," but he does exactly what he says. He preserves, connects, gives things and gestures a remarkable brightness, strength, sharpness of stage existence - anything but expressiveness, since he, in fact, did not intend to express anything. “Marthaler... destroyed the Event,” precisely and succinctly formulated Marina Davydova (Izvestia), who very rarely allows herself to write nouns with a capital letter. This is certainly true, but what is there to admire here? Abolishing eventfulness, as Davydova writes, stopping time in the “intertemporal”, as Marthaler himself says, is a logical, even inevitable act for a consistent avant-garde artist. In fine art, the avant-garde “destroys the image, cancels the image, reaches the imageless , the blank canvas, the hole in the canvas, the burned canvas” (Umberto Eco), and this path is as predetermined as the route of a tram. The art of the theater, from which it is extremely difficult to squeeze a living body, resisted longer than the canvas and paints, that’s all. The only noteworthy thing here is that Marthaler, to whom the goals, imperatives and ambitions of the avant-garde are completely alien, observes the usual, now meaningless way of action - “like a dog that has escaped from a blind man, crosses the asphalt in the right place” (Brodsky). And he is not alone.
Frank Castorf works using the same logic, but differently. Let’s remember how he inhabits in “The Master and Margarita” a completely natural (as if he was snatched from the street and transferred to the stage, along with pieces of stuck air) American bar: with glass walls, a refrigerator, a stove on which you can fry real scrambled eggs, a screen at the top. By bringing half of the events (more important than those playing out in visible three-dimensional space) onto this screen, Castorf reduces the powers of the acting subject as best he can: the camera watching the actor becomes more valuable to him than the actor himself; scrambled eggs are more valuable than the person who eats them. Here one can feel the same hostility to general and final meanings (it is no coincidence that Castorf, crossing Bulgakov’s characters, squashed Yeshua Ha-Nozri into a microscopic Ryukhin) and the same preoccupation with “between time” (the languid expectation of a thunderstorm, a liberating catastrophe, became the main theme of the play). And in addition, an even more acute dislike of traditional theater than Marthaler’s: of the space itself, designed to reveal and frame a person. Castorf's performance does not consist of actions, but of situations in which a person is assigned a role that is obviously official. Of course, we can say that it is for this humiliating service, imposed from the outside, that Castorf dreams of taking revenge - “in accordance with the principle of Mephistopheles the Devil, to take revenge in order to recover, to free ourselves, to change ourselves” - only in a very sad way he dreams. Hardly wanting it, the director brilliantly confirmed that the main “creative principle” of Mephistopheles is burdensomeness.
The eatery in Castorf's "The Master and Margarita" is, among other things, a clear and direct emblem of globalization (American fast foods are conquering the world much more successfully than American soldiers), the Tatlin-Babel tower in Matthias Langhoff's "The Inspector General" is its wonderful symbol. “...If there is an unambiguous relationship between the emblem and its meaning, then the symbol with its meaning is in a relationship of fundamental ambiguity and incomplete predictability” (Lotman): this partly explains why the powerful design invented by the set designer Langhof was so little involved in the plot , built by Langhof the director, why the wondrous Tower played in the play by itself. She represented on behalf of a higher reality - not the one in which the characters in The Government Inspector existed, and not the one that the socially concerned director sees in front of him. It is completely incomprehensible how Langhof could say that Gogol’s play for him is, first of all, a satire on the corrupt provincial bureaucracy and, at the same time, that the most significant reading of “The Inspector General” for him is Meyerhold’s great performance. None of Meyerhold's acting techniques had a noticeable influence on the acting, lively and solid. As for the tower, the model for which was the famous model of the “Tower of the Third International” (Tatlin’s model, in turn, was the “Tower of Babel” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder), Meyerhold’s performance of 1926 no longer had anything to do with the aesthetics of constructivism. Meyerhold is important for Langhof not only as the author of a specific performance, but also as “theatrical avant-garde artist number one” - a powerful ally and authority with which, willy-nilly, everyone will take it into account. It is possible that Langhof, secretly from himself, relied heavily on this. Left criticism, primarily French, long ago declared symbolic scenography hopelessly outdated - nothing, just let them try to yap at Meyerhold. And the director himself diligently plays along with the leftists: of course, of course, my “Inspector General” is a political performance...
The case is remarkable: Langhof, who energetically and fruitfully works with “general meanings,” does not want to admit this - neither to those around him, praising him for everything except his real merits, nor, perhaps, to himself. However, it works: the tongue does not turn, but the hands do.
I hope that the reader who went to the performances of the Chekhov Festival will not be difficult to extend the logic of these arguments to other performances: to the elegant and hopeless “Twelfth Night” by Declan Donnellan, to the unsuccessful performance of Robert Sturua “Waiting for Godot”, to the weak but the feminist corrosive “Freedom of Bremen” by Jacqueline Kornmüller, etc. The train of thought seems to be clear, but that’s all I needed. The main thing is this: judging by what I saw, as far as I understand, it looks like the dog was tired of running around alone and sensed that the blind man was looking for her. When they meet each other again, it will become clear: he is not blind and never was blind. He needs a dog simply because he loves it very much. Alexander SOKOLYANSKY |
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