Translated material
Pure speech
Premieres of the Radio Theater Workshop
Radio “Culture” (91.6 FM) declared June as the month of premieres. Marina Bagdasaryan’s project has started working, which seems to me to be the most important radio project of recent times. Yes, I look from my bell tower: what has to do with the theater is important. But I will try to prove that my view is not so subjective.The task of “Culture” is simple: to breathe life into the art of radio theater, which has pretty much faded in recent years. The task is difficult, but doable. Considering the growing popularity of audiobooks and the abundance of pirated recordings of old productions (last year Oleg Tabakov initiated proceedings against the companies Melodiya and TVIC-Lirek), the Radio Theater Workshop got down to business on time.
On the first weekend in June one could hear Lermontov's Masquerade staged by Mikhail Kozakov and Maeterlinck's The Blind directed by Alexander Ponomarev. Then two more works by Ponomarev were performed: “The Handsome Despot” by Evreinov and “All About Love” based on the stories of Teffi (Ponomarev is one of the most subtle “listeners” in our theater, he has been busy with audio performances for fifteen years). Finally, a radio version of Lev Dodin's "Brothers and Sisters" has just been released: a powerful four-hour performance in which almost the entire troupe of the Maly Drama Theater - the Theater of Europe - is involved.
If the reader has not heard about this, if he does not listen to Radio Culture at all, this is sad, but understandable. “Culture,” judging by a May survey by the COMCON-2 service, is listened to by only 2.2% of Muscovites aged 12 years and older. For comparison: Russian Radio has 22.5%; at Ekho Moskvy - 11.7%; the Voice of America has 0.7%. In terms of ratings, the Radio Theater Workshop is unlikely to be capable of much. Maybe “Culture” will gain fractions of tenths, maybe it will overtake “Freedom” in the Comcon tables - all these are joys of internal use. What is important is how radio theater returns us to the original meaning of the Roman word cultura, derived from the Greek word paideia. The Greeks and Romans had in mind, first of all, the education of feelings and only secondarily the assimilation of knowledge and rules of decency. Socrates did not know how to behave decently, Seneca did, but in the sphere of paideia the conversations of the pestering Socrates mean more than the “Moral Letters to Lucilius.”
The cultural meaning of radio theater is the education of an intelligent ear that experiences idiosyncrasy towards falsehood. People with good hearing may not know how accurate the information they are being told by a media company is, but if the person speaking deliberately lies in the comments, they will feel it. The radio theater, if it had grown the way Bagdasaryan imagines, would leave no chance of popularity for people who make their living by selling their voices. And that would be happiness.
We read poetry not only for pleasure - they teach us to convey complex thoughts in an extremely concise form. We read poetry out loud because choosing one intonation, pausing, raising or lowering the tone is a way not only to clarify a thought, but also to appropriate it, make it our property, allow the thought to take possession of us. In radio theater, any phrase simultaneously addressed to the microphone, partner and listener is as full of meaning as a line of poetry. Amateurs get scared the first time they listen to what they have recorded. They do not recognize themselves in the overly bright-sounding voice, their solution of thoughts and feelings in this condensate. Masters are well aware of the effect of oversaturation of radium speech and crystallization of individual words.
The best example is the performance of Maria Babanova in Anatoly Vasiliev’s radio play “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1981). The voice ages more slowly than anything else in a person; at Babanova, it soared to such crystal heights that it took your breath away. Gnostics of the 2nd-3rd centuries A.D. they were not fools. Their ideas about the fact that everything that is best and eternal suffers while being captured by inert matter, that the task of the soul is to free itself from captivity and return to the whole Pleroma, could become the philosophical basis of radio theater. Babanov's magical voice, freed from the stubborn physicality of old age, was undeniably beautiful, her performance should be assessed on a one-point scale - genius. However, the current Arbenin of Mikhail Kozakov is also very, very good.
Kozakov did three remarkable things. First, he tamed his artistic egoism. Usually, poems performed by Mikhail Kozakov sound as if he himself wrote them yesterday: the actor creates such intonation turns that the author has to leave the track. He treats Lermontov delicately. Perhaps because the artist and the author are at almost equal distance from the hero. Arbenin for Lermontov is “me” plus several decades in the circumstances of style; for Kozakov - “I” minus several decades in the long-forgotten circumstances of style: in general, the positions are balanced. It turns out flexible, bright and with more attention to the subject of conversation than to yourself. Arbenin became Kozakov's best big role in recent years.
The second wonderful thing: the director and leading actor found comrades in the wondrous art - the actors of the “Pyotr Fomenko Workshop”. Nowadays no one copes better with poetic drama than them: the teacher instilled in the “Fomenki” a sense of self-worth, politeness and an ear for music, and these are the keys to correct handling of poetry. Polina Kutepova (Nina), Galina Tyunina (Baroness Shtral), Kirill Pirogov (Prince Zvezdich) are unusually good, and good in different ways. Kutepova in the role of Nina can be recognized immediately, but Tyunin has to figure it out for a long time: the difference in devices would be interesting for a specialist. The opportunities provided by working with clear speech turned out to be tasty. On “Culture” they don’t say directly that the “Fomenki” are already ready for their next work, but they hint: something similar is possible, they fell in love with radio theater - and they did the right thing. So go ahead.
“Brothers and Sisters” by Lev Dodin is a project that should honestly be called a museum project. It would be a lie to say that the great show has become outdated; it must be said that he has aged. The decline of a great show and the ability of radio theater to re-understand its life will be the topic of the next article.