City of coffins

About the premiere of the Ginkas performance in the Yale repertoire theater, rumors came very different, but mostly enthusiastic ones. They talked about the famous inanimateness of Ginkas, which demanded more rehearsal days from the Americans than they were used to, and completely unusual - Russian - a work style that implies round -the -clock creative burning. They said how everyone was struck by his furious energy, because of which the middle-aged ginkas heart attack was even compared with the rock singer. Our compatriots were annoyed by the posters, which were glued by the entire university city - a bear with a violin, against which the little -minded Russian Rothschilda was written little understandable of Russian letters. Then they were already amazed that the audience was traveling to the premiere under unexpected snow from afar, from other cities, that they applauded standing (which did not happen here) and persuaded more performances to play more than planned.

Ginkas had already put in America - half a year ago, a “lady with a dog” played in Cambridge, but this time the production was made for Tsuza, with our actors, and rehearsals were also underway in Moscow. And the Yale Theater "entered into a share" so that it was here that the world premiere was played. Let the actors relax after the American marathon (rehearsals plus 16 in a row), Ginkas postponed the Moscow premiere for almost a month - until March, so we saw it only now.

"Rothschild violin" is the last part of the Ginkas trilogy "Life is beautiful. According to Chekhov", conceived a long time ago. He put the parts of it in order: at first the second appeared in the Youth Theater - "Black Monk". Then the first - "Lady with a dog." And now the series is completed: after the joyless, desperate love of the “lady ...” there is the madness of the “monk”, and behind her is the death of the “Rothschild violin”. This is what a beautiful life looks like in Chekhov and Ginkas.

Ginkas came up with a special way to shift Chekhov’s prose for the stage: he takes it entirely, almost without bills, and spreads it into voices, as in the choir, creating a dialogue from the narrative. In the case of Rothschild's violin, he brought this trick to almost absurdity. A tiny ten -page story turned into a one and a half hour performance for four artists, the main event of which is the spiritual transformation of the gloomy coffin Jacob, which he experienced literally in one day - from the death of his wife to his own. That is, an event whose creature is inside a person, and not outside of him - the internal monologue of a sick and a wealthy tomb.

From such a “choral reading”, the Chekhov story begins to seem almost verbose: Yakov himself discusses what Chekhov could only think about, and his meek wife Martha, although his whole life was wordless, loudly complains that her husband never spared her. Everyone spoke with words that slowly and awkwardly fecked in the longing mind of Jacob. And this scratching clumsy verbose suddenly turned out to be resolved from non -percent. A painful attempt to learn to say the one who was before the dumb, and now his unusual voice sounds too loud, and his sound is unpleasant.

Ginkas laid out Yakov’s thoughts on the voice: “Martha: Yakov saw ... Jacob: what? .. Martha: it’s bad, and Martha will die very soon ... Feldsher: not today ... Martha: Tomorrow.

Slowly, with large pauses, the emerging words seem to be a tongue -tied tongue. Heroes show us every word, as if extending in their hands, not knowing how to call it. As an old man who recently learned to read, moves his lips, pronouncing all the words and thinking over them again. So there is a feeling of difficult unusual thought, the inept movement of the soul. Of us, accustomed to quick reactions and a rapid alternation of events, Ginkas literally draws the veins with his clumsy slowness. He knows this - no one like him, he knows how to hurt the viewer, make him cry. And a painfully stretching action about Jacob, nicknamed Bronze, will also break out at the end with a scream and tears.

Sergey Barkhin built a city of coffins on the stage. Forest of the coffins, the flotilla of the coffins. Houses, birdhouses, boats, troughs, baby cradles - everything turns out to be freshly prolonged coffins, which scored the house of Jacob and his life. Not a coffin - only a workbench on which there are boards that have to turn into coffins. And a huge dry tree with hollow, which is almost not visible in the back of the stage, where the coffin will go away.

Yakova is played by Valery Barinov - one of the best artists of the Maly Theater, famous for the roles of the noble and wide soul of the drunkards of Ostrovsky. But now his Jacob is heavy and gloomy, new thoughts and feelings are for the tomb of overwhelming work and cause intolerable pain. Next to him, massive and rude, Martha, who is played by the young Tusov actress Arina Nesterova, wrapped in a black scarf, with her high voice and senile intonations seems a tiny and ethereal old woman. When Yakov keeps her on his knees on the way to the hospital - a thin, unnaturally straightened on the board - she looks plaintively, like a doll or a child in unusual hands.

Ginkas is considered the director a tough, but in comparison with the truly tough and dry-sustainable story of Chekhov, it is clear how much more sentimentally, how naked here everything that is hidden in prose. Ginkas invents some of its own history. When Jacob, languishing along his deceased wife and “losses” of his life, comes to the banks of the river, - Martha appears, already young, without a scarf, and goes along the rib of the coffin, as if along the bridges, fun, and the tomb in the whole throat desperately starts: “I love - I can’t wait!” The “revived” wife troubles with Jacob in the hospital, as he had before, and with concern listens to the news that he will die soon. There is love in this performance.

And the second: an important Jewish theme for Ginkas, unexpectedly for this plot, became the main one again. The freckled flutist Rothschild, which appeared in the story three times, on the stage accompanies Jacob's whole life - interferes, irritates, sympathizes. He all the time confuses underfoot and bit all the time. Rothschild is played by Igor Yasulovich. He is humiliated and ridiculous, he is ridiculously jumping, lifting his legs high - the paces from under the hat are scattered, the lapcer is fluttered. They pulled off his lapcerdak - there is a skinny naked body behind the shirt, and he is frightened, but everything tries to demonstrate his miserable pride: "If I had not respected you for your talent, then you would have flew out of my window for a long time!" Chekhov has a violinist - Jacob, but Ginkas leaves him only coffins. The violin - the role of which the saw performs here - is given to the entire Rothschild. It was he, like a Shagalovsky violinist on the roof, sitting on the highest house-tribe, extracting mourning sounds with a bow from a saw.

In essence, reconciliation with the Jew turns out to be the main plot of the performance, and it was Rothschild, raising his hands and swinging mournfully at the top of the dry tree, mourning the fate of the Russian anti -Semite Jacob under the Jewish motives of the tenfold. And it dances cheerfully and desired memorial - in his life - dance.