Bouillon of the novel

“A Seedy Family” on the stage of the new Theater Arts Studio

The wise Sergei Zhenovach for the first performance of the new theater, formed from the students of his course, chose a non-finito image, the unfinished novel by Nikolai Leskov “A seedy family” (Family chronicle of the Protozanov princes. From the notes of Princess V.D.P.). For young theater, the non-finito image is the most rewarding. By definition, it involves improvisation, free, easy movement within the text and the possibility of constantly searching for new meanings and ideas in it. The very incompleteness, “brouillonness” (“draftiness”) of the novel is a wonderful opportunity to create a performance “for growth”, in which everything will improve and change for the better from time to time. It’s funny that the sincere charm of such “brouillon” is already revealed in the design of the show’s program. In it, in all its sweet clumsiness, the text about the characters and performers, written by hand with blots and cross-outs, is reproduced. This text is associated with examples of album culture of that very novel era.

It is also admirable that Zhenovach found a “draft” that does not require leniency. Leskov himself was tormented by his unfinished novel. The questions raised in it (about the fate of the nobility, about what was written in the family, and how to live with God) tossed and turned like a lump, endlessly pushing the boundaries of the genre. It is impossible to end the “seedy family”, even though it is almost all finished in broth. My hands have fallen away from him, and it’s a hundred times easier and more pleasant for me to think about new work than to return to this aching wound... Let time pass, then maybe I’ll finish something, but now... this causes a lot of black blood to collect in the heart. We must first forget” - this is from a letter from 1874 to Aksakov. And here is a message to Suvorin in 1889: “This is dear to me, like nothing else I have written, and I would passionately like to see this sketch spread as widely as possible...”

A sketch, a family chronicle, a letter... The artist Alexander Borovsky very accurately deduced the plastic formula for all these concepts. He designed cells in two tiers on stage, stylized as the ancient frames of a family gallery. Or maybe this is an album with daguerreotypes. And we leaf through it, disturbing someone’s life, half erased in the memory of faded prints. Heroes, glorious people of the Protozanov family, appear in the frames. They are represented by Vera Dmitrievna (actress Anna Rud), granddaughter of the noble princess Varvara Nikanorovna, under whom the family still flourished. What’s remarkable is that the director made the spicy, juicy taste of Leskov’s word fully felt. The action is structured like reading a novel: all the words from the first person and from the author are spoken by the characters themselves, and the speech flows as beautifully as it should. It doesn’t get lean or clogged anywhere.

The heroes replacing each other in the frames, first taking picture poses in the manner of academic painting of the golden Pushkin age, slowly tell the story of the life of an honest family. The mistress of the house both in the novel and on stage is Varvara Nikanorovna Protozanova, played by the beautiful Maria Shashlova in exactly the same way as seen by Leskov when describing her “large portrait by the famous Lampi”: “The portrait is painted in full height, in oil paints, and represents princess at a time when she was only twenty years old. The princess is represented as a tall, slender brunette, with large, clear blue eyes, pure, kind and unusually intelligent. The general facial expression is affectionate, but firm and independent. The downward hand of white roses and the protruding leg of one toe of the shoe give the figure a soft and regal movement.” This is how her role is played: softly and regal. In general, there is a great temptation to start savoring all the textured little touches loved by Zhenovach and his actors in the creation of each of the characters “portrayed” on stage, be it the princess’s maid Olga Fedotovna (Olga Kalashnikova), who is capable of innocently sacrificing everything for the sake of her beloved princely family, or the unlucky trumpeter Petro Grayvorona. (Alexander Oblasov), who did not abandon the husband of Princess Varvara Nikanorovna, Prince Lev Lvovich (Andrei Shibarshin), in a terrible battle. The battle for the prince, the boy - the hero of the war of 1812, turned out to be the last, and Grayvorona began to live with the princess in a shelter and received three glasses of vodka a day. And one must see how these glasses are accepted by Grayvorona, drunk, and how gradually he hilariously falls out of his framed portrait in a drunken state. There is a lot of excellent work in the performance. One feels that the director welcomes his actors so warmly that he absolutely cannot come to terms with small roles for them and gives some (Miriam Sekhon, Sergei Pirnyak) two images, one more beautiful than the other.

The very sweetness of the life of the actors in the image of Leskov’s heroes, the very warm, charming style in which tomfoolery and buffoonery can suddenly, in a simple-minded, family-like manner, give way to tragedy and mental torment, even the two-tier stage structure itself with the performance of chapters in separate cells, becoming “insert short stories”, without a doubt, refers to the great work of Zhenovach’s teacher and like-minded person Pyotr Fomenko “War and Peace. The beginning of the novel." However, Fomenko rebuffs Tolstoy’s sermon. The polyphony of his performance excludes the possibility of the question “in the end.” Sergei Zhenovach summed up the family chronicle of Nikolai Leskov with a sermon of Tolstoyism. In the novel, into the mouth of Methodius Chervev, a sage and seeker of God, Leskov put ideas that were important to him, testifying to his great reverence for the teachings of Leo Tolstoy, that “the soul is Christian by nature,” that “good is its own reward,” that states are not are necessary, and it is necessary for everyone to live for everyone and by everyone for one. Today it is risky to pronounce such ideas in a sensible manner in the audience. If it had happened in any other theater, it would have sounded false and I wouldn’t have believed it. And you believe Zhenovach. Because simplicity saves. And also the way the actor Sergei Abroskin, who plays Chervev, quietly and meekly speaks all these capital truths. Only the one who has the truth can do this. And this shameless truth of common truths reconciles us with the inevitable loneliness (both in the novel and in life) of kind and conscientious people and with the fact that the young theater allowed itself to begin with the conversation “In the end.”

Sergei KHACHATUROV