Without a queen in my head

Premiere at the Oleg Tabakov Theater-Studio

“The Marriage of Belugin” in “Tabakerka”, staged by Sergei Puskepalis, is a joy for fans of the most traditional and at the same time lively, not at all museum theater. The play, written by Ostrovsky in collaboration with Nikolai Solovyov, is slightly shortened (the hero’s first bride has disappeared from the stage, she is only mentioned) and analyzed carefully and sensitively. The director - one of Pyotr Fomenko's students - did not rush at the audience with the demand to immediately evaluate his immortal talent. He gave this talent of his - undoubted, smart, subtle - to the service of actors; not that he completely “died in them,” but deliberately retreated into the shadows. And it is in his acting that we can appreciate him.

Evgenia Miller's Andrei Belugin, a young merchant-manufacturer who has lost his head because of an impoverished socialite who agrees to marry him only for money, is simple-minded, absurd and truly boyishly in love. He looks into her mouth, perceives any phrase enthusiastically, and when she asks him to sit down, he immediately begins to sit down where he was standing - just on the floor, but he still catches himself. When, in the finale, the hero falls out of this mess - he does not begin to love his wife less, but stops crawling like a rag under her feet - then the director throws in a wonderful detail for the dialogue with his wife’s would-be lover. The conversation takes place at a large desk, a traitor friend (Ivan Shibanov) keeps trying to sit on its edge - and Belugin drives him away like a fly: this is his territory, strangers are forbidden to land.

And all the roles are drawn with such precise strokes. “The king is played by his retinue” - and we learn how formidable Belugin the father (Vladimir Krasnov) is from the hysterical trembling of the old servant (Sergei Stepin): as soon as someone objects to the head of the family - and even before Gavrila Belugin himself reacts his possible anger is warned by the clinking of glasses in the hands of the servant and the murmur of vodka pouring uncontrollably from the decanter onto the floor. And Elena Carmina, the object of the hero’s passion, voices her consent to marry him with her mouth full - she swallows the chocolate brought to her as a gift, and is much more passionate about chocolate than about her fiancé.

It must be said that the heroine (her role went to Lina Mirimskaya) is the weakest link in the entire performance. Puskepalis least of all sought to “recreate the 19th century on stage” - but he clearly knows how to hear Ostrovsky’s language, and this language obliges him to a certain manner of behavior. And if all the old, wonderful turns of phrase, with special merchant ceremony, are not thrown out of the play (as other directors sometimes do - and for God’s sake, they have the right) - then the heroine cannot look like a kept model. If only simply because in the play, although she thinks about cheating on her husband, she remains faithful to him - and in the finale she utters the phrase that “they managed to corrupt her mind, but not her soul.” In the mouth of Mirimskaya, who for three hours in a row portrayed a creature equally mannered and senseless, this phrase sounds like a form of mockery - like, what is there to corrupt? She has been in business since she was fourteen.

But you know, there’s a problem with the main character in the play, but the performance is still very good. Because it is correctly centered, it is about Belugin’s marriage, and not about how Elena Carmina got married. And the Beluga world is correct, stable, honest (many of my colleagues have already written about how amusing it is that Ostrovsky’s merchants in our time are often portrayed as the only guardians of stability in the world, and even based on the material from “The Thunderstorm”). He is able to attract even a pretentious society lady, which he does to the complete satisfaction of the audience.

Anna GORDEEVA