THEATER OF THE 60TH PARALLEL

OPERA GLASSES

The Surgut Theater is only four years old. However, it is worth seeing at least two or three performances to understand: the child is a child prodigy. And there is every reason to believe that very soon, finally getting on his feet, he will compete with the bearded ones ...

The Surgut Theater is only four years old. However, it is worth seeing at least two or three performances to understand: the child is a child prodigy. And there is every reason to believe that very soon, finally getting on his feet, he will compete with the bearded masters.

No wonder: the place of his birth does not look like an ordinary Russian province.

Windy Mr. Surgut

Windy City is actually a nickname for Chicago. Surgut, the oil capital of Russia, has much in common with the American metropolis. Both began with swamps infested with mosquitoes. Chicago (from the Indian - "big dead water") more than 300 years ago, ousting the Indian tribes, built immigrants from Ireland. Surgut (from the Khanty - “fish floodplain”) four centuries ago on the lands of the Finno-Ugric tribes was founded by service people who pushed the borders of the Russian state. A small fortress with a church, a prison, a powder magazine and a fire tower became one of the centers of the colonization of Siberia, an outpost of trade with the East.

In the encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron, Surgut, only a hundred years old, is described as follows: “There are few streets, they are not paved, they sprout with grass in summer, the inhabitants are 1130 people. The city owns 4 shops. There are 20 craftsmen, there are no factories and plants. The main occupation of the inhabitants is fishing, picking berries, trading and preparing firewood for the Ob steamers.

For the first three hundred years, everything went on like this: furs, fish, timber ... Since 1935, they began to look for oil here. In the 60s, they nevertheless found it - here the village, which finally received the status of a city, began to develop akin to its American counterpart - in rapid leaps. The population grew from seventeen thousand to nearly three hundred. Now modern high-rise buildings and good roads are being built here, with cute self-irony calling the best sections “15 minutes of America”. There are 20 libraries in the city. The central building, stuffed with ultra-modern technology and much loved by the people (ten thousand readers!), is an architectural marvel, with originality surpassing even the building of the Surgutneftegaz company, popularly nicknamed the Titanic.

And here is the only state district power station in the world that runs on associated gas, a cable-stayed bridge across the Ob with a unique one and a half kilometer span, and a railway station that has no analogues ...

But the climate here is severe and unpredictable. Nine months of winter with steep winds and frosts down to minus 56, a short northern summer. And the constant lack of oxygen. And the cruel June "retirement", tearing the first foliage from the trees. And a street flower bed as an expensive luxury and a source of special pride:

60th parallel. (By the way, St. Petersburg also stands on it. But here, in Siberia, it is completely different.)

Gelman, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky: versions of the young

Most of the residents of Surgut are visitors from industrial centers. The cultural environment for them is an attribute of normal life. Here, in the North, everything is difficult, through overcoming. People work hard and hard, and it is very important for them to feel not in a remote place, but in a living environment. The condition for its maintenance is the theater - as a reliable inoculation against small-town isolation, complacency and lack of culture.

They chose the path of laborious and daring. Right on the spot, in Surgut, the course of the Russian Academy of Theater Arts (RATI) was created, headed by the famous Moscow director Boris Golubovsky. The students are local guys recruited from newspaper advertisements, so no patronage. The teachers are eminent professors. Education - not by correspondence, visits, but the most real, stationary.

After four years of training, twenty "Golubov" actors became the troupe of the Surgut Music and Drama Theater. A year later, graduates of the course of Oleg Kudryashov joined them. This is how a unique team of actors appeared, the oldest of which was only 25 years old at that time. They had to create a theater that would be interesting to every inhabitant of the city.

The city helped to purchase lighting and sound equipment, technical equipment, computers for the theater services. In the first season, they managed to release nine performances and go on tour in the Tyumen region. Earned the first money. Young actors began to be recognized on the streets of the city.

We played at different venues. In the title role of "Richard III" (staged by Harold Strelkov), 22-year-old Ivan Kosichkin, the youngest Richard in the history of world theater, flashed, despite Moscow skeptics who shrugged their shoulders in bewilderment: "Shakespeare for drillers?" Drillers accepted the avant-garde version with a bang.

His own director also grew up - also a graduate of the Surgut course of the RATI Vladimir Matiychenko (now - the head director of the theater). For his first production, he took Alexander Gelman's The Bench, which, as a rule, was designed for a "star" entreprise. He came up with a bold scenography (a pillar with a loudspeaker as the third character) and a light score reminiscent of the art of the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, achieved an ideal stage partnership between Elena Semko and Ivan Kosichkin - and got into the popular hits of the season.

Now there are already 23 performances in the repertoire of the theater, and the favorite slogan is on the banner: “The version of the young”. This means taking high-quality dramaturgy and using the classics to speak on modern topics. About the tragedy of an unclaimed mind and talent (“Richard III”), about loyalty to yourself and your dream (“Golden Chain” by A. Green, staged by V. Matiychenko), about the fact that you cannot serve beauty and power at the same time (“Burn, burn, my star”, directed by G. Strelkov). About all-encompassing egoism and disastrous indifference in the era of the power of money ("Humiliated and Insulted") - a backdrop made of crumpled paper, resonating with the torn consciousness of the hero (either pompously golden, then deadly blue), became the compositional center of the production.

Breaking stereotypes, combining genres, using all the synthetic potential of singing, dancing, plastically expressive actors - by the way, age roles are played here without “senile” makeup, they play with gait, facial expressions, soul, and the viewer believes that the theater is busy with real human studies.

In November 2003, Strelkov's production of The Humiliated and Insulted became the winner of the 7th International Festival of Performances based on Dostoevsky's works in three out of five categories at once.

“I really like the progress in the development of our theatre,” said Alexander Sidorov, Mayor of Surgut, after the premiere of The Humiliated. - Previously, performances were necessarily introduced by an artist with a name who would “pull out” the performance if something suddenly went wrong. Today this is not necessary. We remember very well how Moscow theaters came: people often walked on the principle “I can afford it” or “we must go to say: I was at the performance yesterday.” Today's audience loves the theater, waiting for the opening of the season or the premiere of the play.

Theater without a roof

Tamara Lychkataya has been in charge of the “Kamerton” culture and leisure center for many years and could continue to sit in a prestigious institution under the patronage of “Surgutgazprom”. But the temptation of the theater snatched her, a director by education, from a comfortable chair. And he forced him to take over the leadership of the newborn theater. To organize a theatrical process in a situation where rehearsal rooms, dressing rooms, scenery are scattered throughout the city.

It was she who was picking up the course, with directorial vigilance snatching potential stars from the crowd. She took her students to the Moscow Theater Olympiad. She "produces" the best directors and invites a well-known stage speech teacher, associate professor of the Russian Academy of Theater Arts Elena Proskuryakova for her children. Now in a city where the most unimaginable dialects and accents are mixed up, the purest literary speech is heard precisely on the stage.

At the same time, even young stars do not suffer from snobbery in the Surgut theater. There is an opinion in the theatrical environment that this is a sure sign of the success of the theater. Let it be without walls and roofs.

At the summer festivals in Paris and Saint-Malo, the Surgut Music and Drama Theater hosted sophisticated European audiences. At the beginning of the next season, Moscow will also be able to notice.