Cafe "Fatherland"

"Drums in the Night" - premiere at the Et Cetera Theater

Drums in the Night is an early play by Bertolt Brecht; it was written in 1919, the author was 21 years old. Director Ulanbek Bayaliev, a graduate of Sergei Zhenovach's directing course, is ten years older, but the performance at the Et Cetera Theater is his debut on the big stage. Debut actors, as a rule, want to say everything at once, in any case, to communicate something most important - and it is precisely what the representative of the new generation of directors considers to be the main thing that makes this performance interesting.

Andreas Kragler (Valery Pankov) returns home from the war. He fought somewhere in Africa, was in captivity, there was no news from him for four years - and his girlfriend Anna (Natalya Nozdrina) finally got tired of waiting and went to bed with the businesslike speculator Friedrich Murk (Nikolai Molochkov). They are going to officially become husband and wife (Anna is not too happy about this, but she is in a position - and there seems to be nowhere to go), and the play begins with Anna’s parents (the owner of a shell box factory, on whom the tailcoat sits like a saddle on a cow , and his hectic burgher wife) insist on an early announcement of the engagement. Well, the engagement has been announced. The groom (slicked impossibly blond hair, manner of walking in an eternal obsequious quarter bow, leather coat, which would later become an attribute of the SS) is happy. And then, of course, this same former lover appears - a former soldier - a former prisoner.

The realities in the play are emphatically German, emphatically from a long time ago (even the grandmother-servant, while cleaning something on stage, affectionately mutters Deutchland uber alles). Of course, the Piccadilly bar, renamed by the owners into the Fatherland cafe, causes a knowing chuckle in the audience, but in general the director does not make the task easier for the viewer in any way, does not in any way bring the story of almost a century ago closer to him. Brecht's very idea that the viewer should perceive theatrical action with his brains, and not with his feelings, seems to have been perceived by the director too pedantically.

As a result, the invented picture remains a picture. The picture is sharp, almost clown-like in its sharpness, but impossibly cold. Here is a shopkeeper mocking a front-line soldier in a cafe, riding on some kind of hybrid of a bar counter and a black piano. Here the servant hands the soldier a gas mask: “You forgot your hat.” Here is a detachment of rebels marching under a red banner with a song - a variation on the theme “the priest had a dog.” But everyone’s voices are artificial and cardboard, their gestures are too pathetic (and this is not a complaint against the artists, this is clearly what was demanded of them). The story of how a soldier returned from the war, how he rushed into the revolution, and then did not give a damn about it and decided that the most important thing was that the woman he loved had returned to him, Brecht himself subsequently did not like very much, the idea itself seemed wrong to him . “I don’t care, I don’t care, I’m tired of fighting” - in Brecht’s adult years, this motto was alien to him. That is, he did not advocate war, oh no, but it seemed important to him to figure out who was right and who was wrong. In my youth, it seemed that everyone was to blame, there were no rightists, and all “Drums in the Night” was one such cry of “Fuck you all!”

And the current young director reproduced this very cry carefully, as if he had read it spell by letter. And suddenly it turned out that the text, which periodically has something in common with today (despite the constant mention of “Spartak” - not a sports team, but a social movement, and a certain Rose, in which not everyone will guess Rosa Luxemburg), was so coldly recited, still fulfilled its function. He spoke about the current manner of young people to send everyone away - without a passionate fuse and boiling feelings. The soldier and his wife spat with the drunken demonstrators, climbed onto a stage structure somewhere (either a rectangle of a building with square, blunt windows, or some kind of analogue of a fortress lattice) and wrapped themselves in a steel sheet like a blanket. Whether they will survive like this is not something the director decides for them.

Anna GORDEEVA