If you meet yourself, die

Karil Churchill's play “ The Number of the Gazeta” Ivoning Standard recognized the best English drama of 2002. Mikhail Ugarov’s appeal to this play is significant: it is comprehended in the main aesthetization of the banal for the documentary theater.

At first, it seems that Boris Plotnikov and Maxim Vitorgan play a good old English comedy on the new stage of the Chekhov Moscow Moscow Art Theater, the action of which is built on numerous qui Pro Quo. Salter, a 60-year-old widower (Boris Plotnikov), who dedicated life to educate the only son of Bernard, learns from the latter about the existence of another nineteen “sons” who were born as a result of medical experiments on cloning. Throughout almost the entire action of the play, the father tries to direct him into a comedic direction, that is, to return the impaired “correct” state of things to the state of the norm. He offers to sue a doctor who conducted an experiment on cloning, 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 the comedy are also connected with his desire to avoid responsibility to his son and to himself for committed in the past.

The play does not give the play to remain a comedy son Salter Bernard, the character played by Maxim Vitorgan, - a bewildered, huddled, nervously tugging on a folded black umbrella - just to rest, hold on to, grab something. Doctors who carried out an experiment on cloning, according to Bernard himself, violated his unity, weakened identity. In the first act, the father and his son talk about how strange and terribly it becomes when you suddenly see yourself in the observation camera in the store, or you will hear your own voice on the answering machine ... "They say that if you meet yourself, then you will die ... Any amount is a shock."

In the first three actions, the plot of the play develops according to a detective scenario: a son who has discovered that there are still nineteen people like him in the world - whom? - brothers, people, "pieces" (English Things) - asks his father questions about his past. To explain to his son how cloned brothers could be born, his father has to tell a lot about himself, explain the reasons for his actions, and plead guilty. Boris Plotnikov, playing the role of Salter, is no coincidence from time to time wandering around the stage with a lantern, as if looking for, looking for something (around? In his past? Inside himself?)

As a result, Bernard achieves from his father a recognition that after the death of his wife, he throws an unloved son and tries to start life over the first, getting with the help of the latest achievements of medicine the same exactly the boy as his first son was at the time of birth. “I did not want another, I wanted the same,” the father admits in response to the terrible guess of his son 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 the Elder. The difference between the eldest and the youngest is that the father gave the youngest the love that he did not experience for the eldest ... And as the youngest does not forgive the father of that dislike, so the elder does not forgive his father dislike to himself. Junior Bernard leaves his father and leaves: "I do not feel ... I just come to my senses ...". And then everything is logical, everything is predictable: the elder Bernard kills the younger one, and then he ends his life with suicide. In fact, the plot of duality unfolds, which is based on the attempts of the hero to get rid of his double and gain the lost unity of the person. This plot rests on tense dialogs-sodins associated with desperate search for oneself and attempts to determine the meaning of their existence in the world.

The excellent work of the artist Andrei Klimova and the artist in the world of Maria Belozertseva allows the audience to see the plot situation a little differently. A transparent synthetic mesh stretched in several rows divides a small elongated scene into several corridors. Actors cannot freely move around the stage, they have to follow these corridors and go to a new level - closer or further to the viewer - only where the net ends. In addition, from the side of the auditorium it seems that everything that happens on the stage is hidden behind a flickering screen. So illustrated in vain and old -fashioned attempts to answer questions regarding the real, genuine, present. Togo and look, one of them will rush at this invisible net - in despair and powerlessness, and the net will push them back. Or the network will break and the hero will get confused in it and will not be able to escape. Fortunately, all these audience expectations remain unrealized.

There is another round of development of the plot in the play, which takes the play beyond the framework of the tragedy. The “old”, “dilapidated” person, for whom the main value is his own unity and unity, enter into a fight with rock. But in the play appears a "new" person who leaves the scene the winner. This is Michael Black, a 35-year-old "teacher of mathematics, married, father of three children" ... he is one of those nineteen. “Tell me about yourself,” the old man Solter asks him. “Something personal, from the very depths of your life.” “I love brown shoes and banana ice cream,” Michael reports. And he also does not like war because she is inhuman. And about the fact that he makes his way through ... Well, for example, a recent discovery: it turns out that his wife’s ears are disproportionately large about the size of his ear. - And he suddenly sinks directly ... "This is not a character of anti -utopia, but the most ultramodern hero of the present tense. He does not know how to speak at all, gives rise to speech on the go, improvises, expressing the extremely trivial general judgments. The hero of the current talk show and the reader of glossy magazines. He is not scared by the presence of brothers -clones - this is not even frightened. Charming.

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

The plot of duality, so popular in the literature of the XVIII-XX centuries, is realized in the century as the plot of cloning. The concept of unity and uniqueness of the human person is destroyed before our eyes. In the last century, these questions were problematized by the culture of postmodern, which proclaimed the death of the author and doubted the possibility of an exclusive, original statement as such. Bring the real category was possible in connection with the virtualization of the space surrounding us (see the "Show of Truman"). Cloning has become a metaphor for the attitude of a person today.