Olga Roginskaya. If you meet yourself, you will die

Quantity Caryl Churchill's play " " was recognized by the Evening Standard newspaper as the best English drama of 2002. Mikhail Ugarov's appeal to this play is significant: it comprehends the aestheticization of the banal, which is central to documentary theater.

At first it seems that Boris Plotnikov and Maxim Vitorgan are playing out a good old English comedy on the New Stage of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, the action of which is based on numerous qui pro quos. Salter, a 60-year-old widower (Boris Plotnikov), who has devoted his life to raising his only son Bernard, learns from the latter about the existence of nineteen more “sons” born as a result of medical cloning experiments. Throughout almost the entire action of the play, the father tries to direct him into a comedic direction, that is, to return the disturbed “correct” state of things to a state of normality. He proposes to sue the doctor who carried out the cloning experiment, tries to understand how to use the current situation, for example, to get rich, etc. The father's attempts to reduce the whole story to comedy are also connected with his desire to avoid responsibility to his son and to himself for what was done in the past.

What prevents the play from remaining a comedy is Salter's son Bernard, the character played by Maxim Vitorgan - confused, hunched over, nervously fiddling with a folded black umbrella in his hands - just to lean on, hold on, grab onto something. The doctors who carried out the cloning experiment, according to Bernard himself, violated his uniqueness and weakened his identity. In the first act, father and son talk about how strange and creepy it becomes when you suddenly see yourself in a surveillance camera in a store, or hear your own voice on an answering machine... “They say that if you meet yourself, you will die... Any amount is a shock."

In the first three acts, the plot of the play develops according to a detective scenario: a son who discovers that there are nineteen others like him in the world - who? - brothers, people, “things” (English things) - asks his father questions about his past. To explain to his son how cloned brothers could have been born, the father has to tell a lot about himself, explain the reasons for his actions, and admit his guilt. It is no coincidence that Boris Plotnikov, who plays the role of Salter, wanders around the stage from time to time with a lantern, as if searching, looking for something (around? in his past? inside himself?)

As a result, Bernard gets his father to confess that after the death of his wife, he abandons his unloved son and tries to start life over again, using the latest advances in medicine to get the same exact boy as his first son was at the time of birth. “I didn’t want something different, I wanted the same thing,” the father admits in response to his son’s terrible guess that he is not just Bernard, but the younger Bernard. It turns out that it is not genuine at all. He is a copy of Bernard Sr. The only difference between the elder and the younger is that the father gave the younger the love that he did not feel for the elder... And just as the younger does not forgive the father for that dislike, so the elder does not forgive the father for the dislike for himself. The younger Bernard leaves his father and leaves: “I don’t feel myself... I’ll just come to my senses...”. And then everything is logical, everything is predictable: the elder Bernard kills the younger one, and then he himself commits suicide. In essence, the plot of duality unfolds, which is based on the hero’s attempts to get rid of his double and regain the lost unity of personality. This plot is based on intense dialogues and duels associated with a desperate search for oneself and attempts to determine the meaning of one’s existence in the world.

The excellent work of artist Andrei Klimov and lighting designer Maria Belozertseva allows viewers to see the plot situation a little differently. A transparent synthetic mesh stretched in several rows divides the small elongated stage into several corridors. The actors cannot move freely around the stage, they have to walk along these corridors and reach a new level - closer or further to the viewer - only where the grid ends. In addition, from the side of the auditorium, it seems that everything that happens on stage is hidden behind a flickering mesh screen. This illustrates the futile and old-fashioned attempts to answer questions concerning the real, the authentic, the present. Just look, some of them will throw themselves at this invisible net - in despair and powerlessness, and the net will push them back. Or the net will break and the hero will get entangled in it and will not be able to escape. Fortunately, all these audience expectations remain unfulfilled.

There is another round of plot development in the play, which takes the play beyond the scope of tragedy. An “old”, “decrepit” person enters into a duel with fate, for whom the main value is his own uniqueness and individuality. But a “new” person also appears in the play, who leaves the stage as a winner. This is Michael Black, a 35-year-old "math teacher, married, father of three"... He is one of those nineteen. “Tell me about yourself,” old man Salter asks him. “Something personal, from the very depths of your life.” “I like brown shoes and banana ice cream,” says Michael. He also doesn’t like war, because it’s inhumane. And as for the stuff that gets under your skin... Well , for example, here is a recent discovery: it turns out that his wife’s earlobes are disproportionately large relative to the size of the ear itself. “Suddenly you notice something like that and suddenly it just sinks in...” This is not a dystopian character, but the very best ultra-modern hero of the present time. He does not know how to speak at all, generates speech on the go, improvises, while expressing extremely trivial general judgments. The hero of current talk shows and a reader of glossy magazines. He is not afraid of the presence of clone brothers - it’s funny, even charming Michael is driven by a completely different feeling: he is interested.

“Tell me, are you satisfied with your life?” old man Salter asks his “son.” "Yes, I'm happy. Sorry." This is the last phrase in the play. And this is no longer a tragedy, but a documentary. Michael leaves and his father remains on stage. The one who tried to start life from scratch, setting his life story anew. “My actions are not as trivial as banana ice cream, and not as universal as the search for a comfortable position in bed,” his father says shortly before Michael leaves. This is his only defense: he cannot boast of a sinlessly lived life. But, in any case, he has something to tell about his life, and this justifies him. He sits, illuminated by the light of the moon. Suddenly, next to the original moon, another moon lights up, then another and another, two, four, five, eight. Then it doesn’t matter which of them was the first and the real one... It seems that the performance will end with such a director’s joke, which will only more clearly illustrate the absurdist nature of modernity. However, the director makes one more final move: at the very last moment, all the moons will go out and she will be left alone again. The same, real one, in the light of which an old man will sit, hunched over, broken, alone with his torments of conscience, with his guilt... A man who has preserved himself.

The plot of twinning, so popular in the literature of the 18th-20th centuries, is being realized in the new century as the plot of cloning. The concept of unity and uniqueness of the human personality is being destroyed before our eyes. In the last century, these questions were problematized by postmodern culture, which proclaimed the death of the author and doubted the possibility of an exclusive, original statement as such. Undermining the category of the real turned out to be possible in connection with the virtualization of the space around us (see “The Truman Show”). Cloning has become a metaphor for the worldview of man today.