| The Moscow Drama Theater tour opened with “Masquerade” Bolshoi Drama Theater named after. G.A. Tovstonogov brought seven performances to Moscow. Three of them - Lermontov's Masquerade, Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House and Michael Frayn's Copenhagen - were directed by Temur Chkheidze. They were released in March 2003, February 2002 and April 2004, respectively, and two months after the premiere of Copenhagen, Kirill Lavrov announced that he wanted to resign and that the theater needed a new leader. Chkheidze, who has been collaborating with the BDT for a long time and successfully, was elected. “...They trust me as a director, but they don’t yet know what kind of leader I will be. And I don't know myself. <...> Everything will be difficult both for me and for the theater,” the new chief director said then, not at all rejoicing over his election. It seems that he was not mistaken: everything is really very complicated.
Temur Chkheidze is a scrupulous and grateful person: many things are important to him besides his work and his success. It is important for him to confirm the dignity of the old Tovstonogov guard; He cares about directors who cared about the fate of the BDT in the most unprepossessing and amorphous times. He would like to keep in touch with them, he wants to work with them together. The tour schedule includes “Twelfth Night,” directed by Grigory Dityatkovsky; there are “The Dresser” and “California Suite” - entertaining performances by Nikolai Pinigin; there is Hauptmann’s gloomy play “Before Sunset,” which Grigory Kozlov staged in such a way that it might seem that the main role here was written specifically for Kirill Lavrov. This performance, by the way, opened the Moscow tour of the Bolshoi Drama Theater in 2001, the first after the death of Georgy Aleksandrovich Tovstonogov (1915-1989), and in the articles, the most benevolent, it was still clear: the sun of the Bolshoi Drama Theater had set. Sometimes this was written in plain text, sometimes even with a tinge of reproach: don’t you understand? It seemed that the BDT continued to consider itself a theater of grandiose tasks (the then tour bill included Racine’s Phaedra, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov), completely not noticing how little these tasks correspond to the available opportunities. It was unfair to say otherwise: to claim that the great era of the BDT ended at the end of the 80s, when Georgy Alexandrovich died calmly at the wheel of his Mercedes.
The theatrical greatness of Tovstonogov, the director who “completed the mission of the Soviet stage” (A. Smelyansky’s expression), is unconditional for me, but I dare to remind you that great performances in the Bolshoi Drama Theater ceased to be born long before Tovstonogov’s death. After “The Story of a Horse” (1975), as the same Smelyansky writes, “... Tovstonogov only finishes the game with dignity, finishing off the main themes of his directorial life.” The historian of the Soviet theater is right: Tovstonogov also had “The Death of Tarelkin” with the incredible, delightful Valery Ivchenko (1983), but it could not stop the natural withering of the theater. Nothing could stop him.
Temur Chkheidze must understand the state of the BDT today; we'll try to figure it out by the end of the tour. “Masquerade,” however, gives no reason to assume that the new chief director already knows how to return the theater to its former glory (or rather, how to find a new one) and what needs to be done for this. Rather, Chkheidze firmly decided what should not be done now.
There was an interesting moment in “Masquerade”: Kazarin haughtily teases the coward and scoundrel Shprikh, who has never fought a duel, he very seriously replies: “And I will always say that I live without a goal // Should not take risks.” Andrei Sharkov said the remark as if in defiance of the direct meaning; his character does not condemn aimless risk, but argues: if life is devoid of purpose, then in this case it is not worth risking it. It’s possible that the actor’s intonation was simply off, but it’s interesting to think about.
BDT im. Tovstonogov is a theater with a rather vague, indefinite present. Today his life does not have an obvious and important goal, does not develop into a new destiny. Maybe things will start to take shape: then the time will come for drastic, risky decisions. It has not yet arrived. First you need to find out how capable and responsive the troupe is. And, no less important, test your own strength.
The fact that Temur Chkheidze undertook to stage Lermontov’s romantic drama is quite understandable: let us remember that his first and, perhaps, main success on the BDT stage was Schiller’s tragedy “Cunning and Love” (1992). The fact that Evgeniy Arbenin is played by Andrei Tolubeev, who played Wurm superbly in “Cunning and Love,” is a forced decision rather than a drastic one. For the director, there is no doubt that this role should be played by a large, significant artist attractive to the public: what can you do if in the BDT troupe the youngest of the large and significant ones will soon be sixty, and he looks exactly the same. Masking your age, covering up wrinkles, putting on a wig is stupid and even disgusting; it is much more interesting to understand what a sixty-year-old romantic hero with very thinning hair and a rounded belly is like. How seriously does he say: “Listen, Nina... I was born // With a soul seething like lava,” etc.? How seriously do those around him take him - both his beloved wife (Alexandra Kulikova), and the same Kazarin (Vasily Reutov), who is strongly and deliberately rejuvenated in the play? To what extent does Arbenin himself feel the approach of senile impotence?
All this could have been very interesting, but for some reason one of the director’s main tasks became a boring and trivial task: to stage a publicly beautiful performance from aristocratic life. Hence the simplified mise-en-scène with the annoying appearances of the Unknown (Anatoly Petrov) in the background; hence the simple-minded scenography of Yuri Gegeshidze: columns, draperies, Nina’s white coffin, tied with a ribbon and a bow, like a bonbonniere. Hence the feeling of decent and prosperous boredom that depresses every competent theatergoer.
I sincerely hope that the next BDT performances will dispel this feeling. Alexander SOKOLYANSKY |
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