One touch

A play based on the novel by Mikhail Shishkin was performed at the Fomenko Workshop

“The Most Important” - this is how the Fomenko Workshop called the performance based on Mikhail Shishkin’s novel “Venus’s Hair,” a multi-layered and foggy five-hundred-page book that a year ago received the National Bestseller Award. To be honest, The Hair of Venus is the last novel one would imagine being presented in a theater. Everything in it resists this: the alternation of scraps of different stories that almost do not add up to a single plot, and language exercises that are not without mannerisms, and mountains of metaphors that obscure the meaning... But Evgeny Kamenkovich, directing Shishkin, seemed to look at the novel innocently, sweeping aside the incomprehensible and finding direct connections between plot fragments. As a result, where it seemed the writer was flirting with virtuosity and being overly significant, a simple and touching story was revealed. About a Russian interpreter (translator) working in a Swiss government office that decides whether to give refugees from the east a residence permit or deport them back. About his wife, from whom he separated, and his little son, to whom he now writes and does not send letters. About youthful love, humiliating service in the army, schoolteacher Galpetra, about jealousy, and also about Tristan and Isolde, Daphnis and Chloe, Xenophon and the Hellenes, who in his dreams are mixed with the stories of refugees from Chechnya. And against the backdrop of all this are fragments of a book by a writer-interpreter about the once famous Russian romance singer, written in the form of a diary that Isabella kept from childhood, from the beginning of the twentieth century, and broke off in 1936.

Kamenkovich placed the story in a museum - this is the Ostankino Museum, where Galpetra took schoolchildren, and the city-museum of Rome, where the interpreter met and parted with his Isolde. Plaster statues, Swiss sterility, colored lighting, videos of beauties, frames on the walls, and most importantly, a smooth floor on which everyone glides dashingly, as if on ice, in felt museum slippers. This sliding sets the charming plastic image of the performance, the same exact as in Kamenkovich’s last performance at Fomenko, “The House Where Hearts Break,” there was the constant hobbling and stumbling of the characters, whose heels broke on the floor strewn with bottle caps.

Everything slides and flies, everything is light and watercolor, in one touch, which is what the actors of the Fomenko Workshop are so famous for. If there was anything serious or difficult in Shishkin’s book, like conversations with refugees, for example, it disappeared without a trace and became a careless theater. Everything corresponds to the subtitle that Kamenkovich gave to the performance - “Etudes and Improvisations”. Each of the eight actors plays almost a dozen roles, instantly moving from one to another, changing their voice, gait, behavior - the entire appearance of the hero. Rustem Yuskaev from Bella’s caring dad, singing in chorus with his mother “All ages are submissive to love...”, turns into a fluttering and chatty Italian guide, then into a famous artist of the pre-revolutionary Art Theater showing off in front of the girl, then into the army “grandfather” Gray, into a cynical doctor and so on...

Everyone is nice, everyone is recognizable, everyone has played something similar before. Mikhail Krylov - whether he is portraying a refugee from Russia, Bella's young lover or a schoolboy - turns out to be a clown. Polina Kutepova is tender, lyrical and very beautiful in all her roles. And only Ksenia Kutepova is completely unrecognizable in this performance. It must be said that this red-haired beauty has turned into a unique character actress with a very wide range. It is worth seeing how she plays Galpetra - a woman without age, a bespectacled woman with a bulging bottom, huge breasts hanging down to her waist, in a plump mohair beret and a brown orphan sundress. Galpetra is unbearably boring, ridiculous, kind and piercingly touching. And two minutes later, having galloped across the stage in the dress and braids of a pre-revolutionary high school student, Ksenia is already trotting on her heels in the role of a clean, cropped girl lawyer who came to prison to meet with a Russian semi-criminal, and blushes all the time.

There are only two actors in this performance, playing one role each: firstly, Madeleine Dzhabrailova - Isabella. She remarkably accurately shows how the heroine changes from a four-year-old child, pulling her hand high up for a gypsy to tell fortunes, to a forty-year-old famous singer, the wife of a Soviet functionary. (Although, it must be said, she, like all Fomenkov’s actors, has been better able to play children’s roles since her student years than mature people.)

The second is Ivan Verkhovy, playing an interpreter. This middle-aged, bearded, gray-haired actor, who had never played with Fomenko before, is immediately noticeable in the play, like a stranger. In essence, he does not play anything, rather dryly, like a director, he outlines the role, remaining on stage an attentive but cold observer and commentator. It turns out, indeed, that Kamenkovich specifically invited not the actor, but the director, to play this role. He needed an outsider, with the view of an author, not a participant, even speaking about himself in the third person. They say that when a new member of the production team came to one of the rehearsals, he immediately asked Kamenkovich: “Is this Shishkin himself?” The director was very proud.

Dina GODER