TWO HUNDRED YEARS HAS NOT HAPPENED

OPERA GLASSES

At Recepter even his theater on the Fontanka is not yet called as it should be. As usual - this is the BDT, Taganka, Moscow Art Theater. And then something from a completely different series: the State Pushkin Theater Center. But the main name was not lost. Let it be in the form...

At Recepter even his theater on the Fontanka is not yet called as it should be. As usual - this is the BDT, Taganka, Moscow Art Theater. And here is something from a completely different series: the State Pushkin Theater Center.

But the main name was not lost. Even as an adjective. And somehow it is immediately clear that this is not a “state” and not even a “theatrical” one.

Theater centers are not obliged to compete with the Pushkin House and publish facsimiles of the manuscript of The Mermaid and Stanislav Rassadin's monograph The Playwright Pushkin. And the Receptor for some reason publishes.

Is the founding father (People's Artist of Russia, teacher, Pushkinist and poet) afraid of a direct statement?

Of course, he is afraid. Because it is almost always across art. And even more so as a drama. But, as Recepter himself once admitted: “We, the actors, are like horses. We'll take it - we'll take it ... ".

This is where it kicks in every time. Today, for example, in the carriage taking Chatsky away.

It's even harder to believe that he's over 70 when you watch his Woe from Wit. “Your boy who played Hamlet” turned out to be so absent-minded that in the half century that has passed since this Akhmatov review of him, he simply forgot to grow old. (Is it not Anna Andreevna who sentenced him to this?) Not a skeptical lad, not a rebel youth, namely, that he is a boy. Just the way it is, open to the future. Either he overheard from Dostoevsky that the alternative and fate of Chatsky is in the tragicomic Repetilov (actor Grigory Pechkysev), or he himself invented this tricycle and a very academic design, and took the bike and went.

The meeting with Repetilov is what morally will finish off Chatsky. After all, this is a meeting with a mirror. And not so crooked. The lordly-servile way of life and the mores of Moscow are not news to Chatsky. Yes, and Sophia's betrayal is not so bad (he knew her price when he ran away for three years, he knew where, to whom and why he was returning).

“Ah, Chatsky, do you like to dress everyone up as jesters, / Would you like to try on yourself?”

He didn't hear it. But tried on in full. For his place in Moscow has already been taken by Repetilov and Ippolit Udushyev. (Like Zhirinovsky and Rogozin two centuries later.)

It is impossible to believe that this play is under 200. As well as the fact that Zhanna Obukhova, who plays Prince Tugoukhovsky, is 20. (However, like all the actors of this theater - after all, this is a graduation performance of the receptive course of the St. Petersburg Theater Academy.)

“I wouldn't play like that girl. And like that Repetilov boy, - broke out after the exam from the main "receptionist", also a Tovstonogov and also a long time "people's" Andrey Tolubeev. (It was said not for publication, but in the hearts and loudly.)

I will understand the correctness of Andrei Yuryevich when the next day I see the same actors without makeup. I see and suddenly I realize that I can hardly recognize anyone. (The receptor will only be surprised: “Well, this is normal, these are other people.”)

And they are not different, they are alive. And almost every textbook string of other recognizable heroes - literary and simply "heroes of our time." Chatsky (Nikandr Kiryanov) - in appearance (“black curls to the shoulders”) and the ardor of youthful passion (here you have “woe from wit”) - Vladimir Lensky, not killed in a duel, Kondraty Ryleev, not hanged, or Andrei Illarionov, who did not retire. Sophia (Marina Kanaeva) is the official mother of the Mother See herself (according to Pushkin - “Moscow cousin”). And Molchalin (Artem Magnitsky) and Famusov (Pavel Khazov) - these are generally from somewhere in that television reality, which the Ostankino Tower generously supplies the rest of Russia on any channel.

However, there they are the shadows of these, but here they are alive - and the play is alive. And the theater of the Receptor is not educational, but real. That is why something arises in him that is on top of the director's interpretation and the idea that Recepter himself has repeatedly stated in his director's prose.

The paradoxical postmodernism of the situation is that there is neither a curtain nor a stage - only genuine (albeit peeling) interiors of a noble estate of the first quarter of the century before last. The actors play in the premises of the home theater, only not on its cramped stage, but in the back hall, from where there are three doors: to the palace chambers of Famusov, to Sophia's room and to the main staircase, along which the viewer climbed here and under which there was once a closet Molchalin.

But it still smells not of Turkish lotions, but of a Russian thunderstorm.

And all the more menacing that no politics - the academic classics of the Russian genre.

The classic "There is nothing to blame on the mirror, if ..." - this is the leitmotif of Russian dramaturgy, the basic "la" of all our songs about the main thing.

It did not begin with Chekhov or Erdman - with "Undergrowth" and Krylov's "What are the gossips to consider working ...".

But in the gallery of this mirror workshop, Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit" became the most prophetic of all the magic crystals. No matter what time turns into, in this play there will always be a line, reflected from which the beam hits exactly at the core of the era. It dissects and highlights what time wanted to hide.

This “something” is tomorrow already living in today's reality.

In 1961, Yursky and Recepter played Chatsky with Tovstonogov. I ask Recepter if there is continuity, and he just waves his hand:

- Yes, what? .. Tovstonogovsky Chatsky is almost a Decembrist. And then “Carriage for me!”, But he has nowhere to go.

Perhaps this is what I wanted to hear. Because if a coachman is found, this Chatsky, who has slipped into an armchair in the front of the Famusov mansion, will be taken straight from here to the government house. And, most likely, not in that "big", from the basement of which Siberia is visible, but in the other - in the "yellow".

Sophia launched gossip, and made a diagnosis. Such at the Serbsky Institute in the second half of the 20th century was given to the great-grandchildren of Chatsky by another Sofya - Sofya Vlasyevna, and in the age of Pushkin and Griboedov, the tsar himself put Chaadaeva as the highest mark for intelligence.

And with the correctness of the diagnosis, everything is very competent; except that psychiatry has nothing to do with it - in a "traditional" society, dissent is the most dangerous kind of madness.

Mirrors (curved and not too crooked) have two curious properties - firstly, they reflect the face of the beholder himself, and secondly, they necessarily turn the image over, and the left eye becomes right, and the right ear - left (which was once very cleverly used by one radical politician who wrote the article "Leo Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution").

What is reflected in today's "Woe from Wit"? To get away from the temptation of reading my own personal, I leaf through a selection of reviews on the Recepter's performance. Surprisingly, both the left and the right seem to have agreed to blow the same tune:

“Molchalin and Skalozub are shown, so to speak, materially, these are the main characters of this performance” (N. Bachurina, Petersburg Classic, March 2006).

Repetilov, who is remarkable here, is least of all close to a caricature, on the contrary, in his progressive platitudes, reaching ardor, almost tragedy. A man tears his soul before your eyes, but it comes out all the same funny and flat. And Chatsky suddenly, with a bitter, instantly illumined bewilderment, understands: but it's me! (Konstantin Shcherbakov. Petersburg Theatrical Courier, No. 4, 2005).

“And a passionate temperamental story came out about a young man who deceived in love and hopes, who confused optics due to his youth. Tried with childhood memories and acquired ideas to change the world, which turned out to be completely different ”(Natalia Kaminskaya. Kultura, May 4, 2006).

Such is the effect of the mirror - regardless of aesthetic and other positions, everyone saw his own, but everyone was delighted with the performance.

So happy to open. Happy is the one who finally waited for Molchalin to speak (“This is Russia, this is our Russia, in which nothing changes!”), And the one who states through gritted teeth: “A merrily played performance leaves a bitter feeling. The audience laughed a lot, after - I want to cry.

And not for three years, but for 15 years, the protagonist of this play fell out of Russian reality: he returned in 2006 and, with unspent fervor, expounds to Famusov and Molchalin revealing articles from Vitaly Korotich's Ogonyok and journalistic essays from Yegor Yakovlev's Moscow News .

It doesn't get any funnier. But the most bitter thing about this funny thing is that Molchalin, Famusov, and Sofya sincerely regret this eccentric (with the letter “H”). And they give him useful and quite sound advice: do as we do, serve, look for your place in the system.

Very little is required of him, but he is incapable of even that. He is from the thaw.

It suddenly turns out that Famusov is smart: he is trying to bring Sophia and Skalozub together because he is afraid of the colonel, whose radicalism is a return to the tough times of Paul I (with our money - Stalin). And the Famus ideal is Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, that is, excuse me, the late Catherine II.

Famusov will win, and Sofya will go after the colonel, even though today he is not her novel. A new, beautiful tomorrow is coming. And the punning "here's a sofa for you - spread yourself to rest" should be realized in this marriage. And Molchalin from a foolish lover will turn into just a lover. After all, he and the colonel would be nowhere without each other. The two victorious elites - the military and just the bureaucratic - must share in order to retain power.

Critics surprisingly unanimously note that in the spring of 2006 Vladimir Recepter's Pushkin School theater-studio was born and took place. This is not political theatre. This is a school with an in-depth study of Russian theatrical classics, which is why Recepter's students studied not for four, but for five long years.

In my opinion, they studied well. And the next stop is Pushkin's "Mermaid". They think it's unfinished. The receiver is convinced otherwise. As he himself says, "our relationship with culture is the drama of the time."