| “Gupeshka” by Vasily Sigarev on the small stage of RAMT Silvery corrugated pipes swing under the ceiling, held by some temporary (that is, eternal for basements and barracks) fastenings. Water is dripping into a bucket that stands literally at the feet of the spectators sitting in the first row. The small stage of the Youth Theater is the size of a small apartment; this time the apartment is on it and was created by the artist Nikolai Slobodyanik: these pipes, a shabby leatherette sofa, an antediluvian sewing machine... The heroine of Vasily Sigarev's play, Tamara, earns money by sewing bed linen at home - the most dull job for a seamstress. The play begins with a man coming to her apartment. More precisely, she brings him herself.
This is not a love story at all, Sigarev is not Radzinsky. Sigarev, with an excellent ability to build dialogue (when relationships and circumstances become clear to the viewer from the crush of garbage everyday words), time after time writes plays focused on one hero (in this case, the heroine). And he always talks about hell.
No, without any romantic delights such as the torment of a creative personality. Sigarev's hell is close, familiar, located in every neighboring basement. This time Toma lives in hell, whom her husband calls a gupeshka. Why? And in honor of the guppy fish, which is scary-looking, unpretentious and survives even in the sewer. Tom is not a person for her husband; Meanwhile, for the first half of the play there is no husband on stage, and we “hear” him only in the heroine’s narration.
This was done absolutely masterfully. The play is good, no doubt about it, but how well it was played! Ramilya Iskander, who got the main role, is fiddling with something in her hands, running half-bent, and goggles her eyes with clinically observed attentiveness. Her heroine in stretched sweatpants and a swamp jacket does not consider herself worthless - and how in Iskander’s intonation you can hear when Toma speaks about herself clearly in the words of her husband! Something like this: he “fired rockets at America while I was spreading manure on the beds in my village.” And the audience laughs, of course; The audience generally laughs a lot; well, yes, she is ridiculous and not smart, a hot kettle being absent-mindedly placed on the linoleum three times and sticking to it three times is funny. But it’s not for nothing that there is a man on stage who listens to Tom - with annoyance at himself for coming to this house, with irritation at the crazy housewife, and finally, with a clearly growing anger at the absent husband, who has organized a life for the woman in which she drinks tea without tea leaves and admires the fact that her husband bought seventeen chrysanthemums for a visiting pop singer (then Tom saw chrysanthemums for the first time; “I’m ugly - after all, no one gives me flowers”).
The play is structured like a journey through hell: turn by turn, from the babbling of the heroine we learn more and more about her life. And we sympathize - together with the guest Pasha (he is played clearly, with excellent accuracy of mental changes by Alexander Grishin), and we are annoyed - well, how much can you endure. And then a reversal occurs - the husband (Alexey Veselkin) appears on the stage.
And the knight-savior, ready to take Toma from the basement nightmare into human life, having fought with the domestic tyrant, gets hit on the head with a bottle from Toma. Everyone chooses their own hell, and Toma chose it too.
Director Anton Yakovlev (“Gupeshka” is his first professional work) did an excellent job with the actors and generally maintained a balance of laughter and tears in the play, designated by the author as “either a comedy or a tragedy.” Only in the finale did he doubt whether it was possible to leave everything as it was, would the audience understand where they had been? - and blew smoke onto the stage, flooding the tattered sofa with scarlet light. It’s worth assuring him: this is unnecessary, everything was clear and so. Anna GORDEEVA |
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