Translated material
Bambarbia & Kirgudu
Kirill Serebrennikov staged a shockingly bland performance
The play “Antony & Cleopatra. Version”, released by Sovremennik, has a genre subtitle: “A play by Kirill Serebrennikov and Oleg Bogaev based on Shakespeare’s tragedy of the same name.” The name was invented poorly: replacing the connecting conjunction with the sign &, demonstrating one’s commitment to the topic of the day (i.e. provincialism) is a boring banality, and any stage interpretation is by definition a “version”. The subtitle is meaningful and precise: before us is precisely a “play based on tragedy”, in which the plot and language of Shakespeare are deprived of their power: everything is crushed, dried out, emasculated.The latter is especially offensive. Chulpan Khamatova and Sergei Shakurov could perform a wonderful love duet: not to play “mad passion” (rabies is monotonous, like any pathology), but to seriously understand the splendor of feelings possessing the Roman commander and the charming queen of Egypt, to trace the logic of intelligent passion and justify each of its movement. Shakurov, although he is sixty-something, remains one of the best “macho men” on our stage; Khamatova’s inner talents are ideal for playing both the sensuality and restiveness of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, without losing sight of the tragic perspective.
“You are beautiful, my beloved, <...> formidable as regiments with banners” - oh, how Khamatova could explain this amazing comparison that came out of the mouth of the author of the “Song of Songs”! But the director orders him to play something completely different - an eccentric and nervous ordinariness with a harsh voice, bad manners and chicken brains: this is at least the case in the first act. The closer we get to the finale, the stronger the energy of Shakespeare's original takes over: the organic nature of the actress responds to her more and more interestingly, more and more confidently, but there is too little time left. For the most part, Khamatova’s Cleopatra, if we recall the actress’s previous works, looks like the older (not much) sister of the ill-fated little boy Andria from the play “Mom-Papa-Son-Dog”: this is unnatural. Maturity of mind and feelings are written down by Shakespeare so firmly that Serebrennikov and Bogaev cannot erase them from the text; What’s even more important is that maturity came to the actress and made its demands: without answering them, one could be stamped out.
It is quite difficult to understand the goals with which the director and his co-author rewrote Shakespeare: the “play based on tragedy” turned out to be chaotic and inarticulate. Please understand correctly: while I admire Shakespeare, Calderon or Gogol, I do not doubt the theater’s right to adapt classical works the way it needs. The fact that “everyone abroad does this” is not an argument for me, but the fact that the practice of popular retellings and simplified translations, “bringing not the reader closer to the original, but the original to the reader,” was energetically defended by M.L. Gasparov is an argument, and a compelling one. For the first acquaintance with a foreign culture, this is a necessary stage, and today for most people on both sides of the ramp, any classical culture that values the word, not excluding Russian, is alien.
Making the classics readable is a depressingly pressing cultural task; I am not sure, however, that Serebrennikov and Bogaev put it before themselves, contaminating the translations of Mikh. Donskoy and O. Soroka (Pasternak’s translation was fundamentally ignored) and stuffing the text with homemade inserts in a “low calm”. I believe that the director was simply going for effect: after all, the audience should be inspired if Cleopatra, to please Caesar, begins to curse Antony: a creature, a bastard, a stinking old man, etc., this is funny. What’s even funnier is that Ivan Stebunov plays Caesar first as an abstract runt in a well-tailored suit, and then, as they say, “gives a tip”: his manner of speaking, tearing off word from word and swallowing the end of phrases, in the last scenes will parodicly resemble Putin’s. It should be quite funny when Cleopatra, recognizing Caesar as her master, kneels down and reaches for the great-power fly. To the public's credit, they don't get too excited.
If I started listing Kirill Serebrennikov’s inventions in name order, the reader might think that the play “Antony & Cleopatra” is worth attention: there really are a lot of them. The Legless Messenger bringing Cleopatra news from Rome (Artur Smolyaninov). A hairless Soothsayer with female breasts (come on, who will remember Tiresias?), a male instrument of priapic dimensions (come on, who will remember Beardsley’s illustrations for “Lysistrata”?) and flyer crutches (at least remember Salvador Dali!) - It is very difficult to recognize Sergei Epishev in this character, for which I sincerely congratulate the actor. The singing eunuch Mardian with a professionally choreographed countertenor (Rustam Yavaev). The play also features numerous disguises and self-igniting boats (the good set designer Nikolai Simonov, for my taste, is too keen on circus tricks). There is also a video screen on which, at the beginning of the performance, two bodies appear in the process of copulation (the image is skillfully processed and resembles a wood engraving come to life), and in the middle - a bearded Pompey against the background of a green banner (Arthur Smolyaninov’s second role). Camouflage, a machine gun, black glasses, an ashtray full of cigarette butts: so that this bandit does not slow down the action too much, Caesar’s henchmen will kill him. Here is the only correction that the scribes made to the plot: in Shakespeare, it was Pompey who the pirate Menas offered to kill the guests, Caesar and Antony, and Pompey, not without regret, refused.
Etc. The trouble is that everything is either invented out of the blue or completely out of place. Serebrennikov never built his own theatrical plot about the confrontation between East and West, he just outlined the contours, and even then he got quite confused. He did not read well into the tragedy that he undertook to rewrite: politics in his performance became intrigue, love became primitive lust, heroes became easily decipherable and uninteresting emblematic figures. The supporting characters remaining in the play are faceless (and what a wonderful figure, for example, Enobarbus, a defector dying of self-loathing, would have become!) and must be jealous of those whom Serebrennikov crossed out.
Little remains in the memory of the performance. The doomed Anthony plays with a basketball in the burnt-out school gym. Cleopatra, who dies kissing her reflection in the mirror (it was not for nothing that her lover called her “the snake of the Nile”). Four trombonists playing the music of Alexander Manotskov. Understanding that the language of the performance staged by Kirill Serebrennikov does not belong to either the living or the dead - it is an artificial, randomly invented language: bambarbia kirgudu. A feeling of failure that naturally develops into a catastrophe - not of the director, not of the theater, but of a culture indifferent to its foundations.