Translated material
It doesn't get any blacker
Anatoly Vasiliev's new performance gives vent to despair
In the theater world, Karl Jaspers is often quoted as saying: “There is no Christian tragedy, because the idea of Redemption is incompatible with tragic hopelessness.” The play “The Stone Guest,” or Don Juan is Dead” (premiere of the “School of Dramatic Art”), if not refutes, then seriously challenges the philosopher’s postulate.It is possible that Vasiliev wanted to stage precisely a “Christian tragedy”, where mutually exclusive things would be combined in an excellent, albeit tormenting way for the viewer (and even more so for the director himself). It is possible that the words “wanted to put it” are not relevant here at all: a person does not want to scream when he is in too much pain, it just happens that way.
The play “Don Juan is Dead” is a cry of pain. Skillful playing cannot and probably is not obliged to completely harmonize this cry, transform it into “music” and thereby remove the destructive message of despair. Those. in principle, it should, if it can: we saw how this happens at the Studio on Povarskaya ten years ago, when Vasiliev staged the brilliant “Lamentation of Jeremiah.” Now everything is different. There will be no studio on Povarskaya soon.
The space in which the “School of Dramatic Art” began has practically already been taken away from the theater: in bureaucratic language this is called “reorganization”. To say that the Moscow City Culture Committee was interested not so much in cultural problems as in the prices of living space occupied by the artists and employees of the “School” is like calling water wet; now the only important thing is that the displaced people do not become homeless. As for art itself, we must say thank you to the committee. The play “Don Juan is Dead” was performed by the Anatoly Vasiliev Theater in the most suitable situation: it could hardly get worse.
“...So black and so dead, /That it couldn’t be deader /And it couldn’t be blacker, /That no one will help us / And we don’t need to help” (Georgy Ivanov).
Suffering and despair are combined in this performance with merciless mockery, which does not at all negate the authenticity of suffering. We have the right to recall the aesthetics of mannerism, in which every situation can be both tragic and comic at the same time. Vasiliev seems to be trying to turn inside out both the meaning of each scene and his own theatrical discoveries. In the program, a sign of this desire were quotes from the “Divine Comedy”, which also seemed to have turned upside down and was now leading back, from Heaven to Hell. What happens in the middle, in Purgatory: “The nettles of sorrow burned me so much, / That the more I loved something, / The more hateful it appeared to me” (Canto Thirty-one), probably corresponds to the director’s personal experiences.
This terzina accompanies the most terrible, most important scene of the play. There is only one thing that immediately prevents me from describing this scene: in Vasiliev’s performances, everything really important never happens without preparation. The viewer must, imperceptibly for himself, identify an area of action, a character trait, an object - only then something irrevocable will happen to them and around them.
The “important” in Vasiliev’s performances creeps up like a tiger; Only in retrospect, after it has attacked and subjugated, can one say: I noticed the whole sequence of discreet gestures, I should have understood the connection between them. Vasiliev's key scene often, if not always, takes the viewer by surprise, but we need to go in order.
Vasiliev staged a diptych. Its first part, which we, following the theater, will call “opera”, is based on the play “A.S. Pushkin. Don Juan, or “The Stone Guest” and other poems” (1998); the second, a “ballet” about the torment of Don Juan in hell, - from the play Los Caprichos - Goya's guests from darkness" (2003, choreographer - Min Tanaka). It is “repelled”, i.e. and takes support and contradicts it. Three scenes are taken from Dargomyzhsky's opera: dinner at Laura's (Maria Zaikova, soprano), the cemetery explanation of Don Guan with Dona Anna (Lyudmila Drebneva, tenor - you may not believe it, but it is written so in the program), his death in Dona Anna's room. The role of Don Juan is played by a new actor in each scene. Ilya Kozin, Kirill Grebenshchikov, Igor Yatsko pronounce the words of the role in that special manner, which was invented and developed by Vasiliev as the best way of a person’s relationship with immortal poetry; everyone has known her for a long time. It is only important to note that the dialogue, in which the speech of a man and the singing of a woman exist on equal terms, in absentia seems ridiculously absurd, but in the play it is completely organic. For those who still believe that Vasiliev has gone a little crazy while developing a new stage speech strategy, “Don Juan is Dead” might clear their ears. Coexistence with Dargomyzhsky’s music makes the School’s speech practice irresistibly convincing.
It is all the more important that from the very first minutes of the action it is clearly realized: the world that opens to us is very bad and close to death. Black camisoles, white shoes of the guests: dinner at Laura’s looks like a funeral feast celebrated in advance (and the businesslike servants of the proscenium, we add in parentheses, look like gravediggers accustomed to their work); Laura herself, dressed in a blue dress embroidered with flowers, somehow suits Magritte’s black bowler hat too well. It's all pretty scary; It becomes even scarier when the singing Laura suddenly switches from an operatic soprano to a sharp, so-called. "white sound" “Yes, I’ll now order you to be stabbed to death!..” - it sounds as if a street wench had awakened in the wonderful singer. Vasiliev excellently trained Maria Zaikova, one of the most courageous and subtle actresses I know: her turns in the role of Laura are breathtaking. And if you remember the strange guttural giggle that sometimes cuts through Laura’s life - no, people can’t do that, only mechanical dolls laugh like that. Or, God forgive me, succubi.
Horror, horror. And the further, the more. The duel between Don Guan and Don Carlos (the right hand holds a wooden sword, the left a rough resemblance to a pistol) is not only different from the fun duel in the 1998 play, it cancels any fun in the past and future tense. After Guan delivers a fatal poke to his opponent in the chest, the silent Leporello will appear on the stage and finish off with a short sword with a cross-shaped handle - no, not Carlos, but the entire white world invented by the artist Igor Popov. The sword will pierce the central support on which the world, in general, was supposed to rest (this gesture will be echoed in the second, ballet part of the performance: the new, bamboo support will be knocked out completely, and it will turn into a witch’s broom). If Don Juan even after this thinks only about how to quickly make love, well, that means he will get what he deserves from hell.
A magician's gesture with which Guan-Grebenshchikov will take two bouquets from his sleeves for Anna-Drebneva (while he himself will be covered with colored feathers). Guana-Yatsko's self-exposure, after which Dona Anna will age crushingly, will hang on wooden crutches (they were foreshadowed by the swords from the first scene). We should tell it again and again, but we have to skip and run: here is Purgatory.
There are no more actors, musicians and opera soloists take the stage. Vasiliev ordered the singers to climb into aquariums filled with water, seething with air: I admit, I still did not understand why. The director’s gesture seemed painful and overly harsh to me, but we have already talked about this: sometimes a scream should remain just a scream, without turning into “art.” Pain and bitterness, better than a skillful game, testify to the value of what is being lost: in any case, they are indisputable.
Meanwhile, the gravediggers are busy with their work. A coffin descends onto the stage from an opening in the left wall: it is buried in the opened hatch. Then clods of earth will fly out of the same opening (they crumble, hitting the floor with a dull sound, and from each blow something inside shudders), then armfuls of carnations. I think that there was not a person in the theater who at that moment did not feel himself being buried in a mass grave.
I won’t describe the second part of the diptych, the “ballet”: I don’t know how, and I don’t really want to. I’ll just say that the program indicates the sequence of Goya’s etchings, based on which it was choreographed by Konstantin Mishin: No. 31 “She’s praying for her,” No. 7, “He won’t even see her anyway,” etc., up to, of course, same, the most famous No. 43 “The sleep of reason gives birth to monsters.” There is a general subtitle: “Happy sailing!” It can be assumed that Vasiliev refers us to etching No. 64 of “Happy Voyage”, depicting creepy creatures rushing somewhere about their business; two of them look back angrily at the man holding the engraving in his hands.
Goya, as everyone remembers, wrote something like a commentary on the etchings from Caprichos; No. 64 is signed as follows: “Where is this hellish gang going, howling in the darkness of the night? In the light it would not be difficult to shoot all these evil spirits. However, they are not visible in the dark.” There is hardly any need to explain who the great director has in mind: as if they themselves don’t know it.