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Novosibirsk "Red Torch" at the "Golden Mask"
Performances in which formal directorial ingenuity is combined with extreme poverty of thought, with the theater’s fundamental reluctance to “talk about the significant and important” (Stanislavsky’s expression), according to my feelings, are becoming more and more numerous. This is what Nina Chusova’s theater has become, this is what “The Adventure” staged at the Moscow Art Theater by Mindaugas Karbauskis turned out to be like this, to the amazement of critics, and this is increasingly becoming the case with the director’s works of Kirill Serebrennikov (it is worth noting that his “The Golovlev Gentlemen,” a play with very serious tasks, was poorly thought out and came out loose; the habit of “significant and important” quickly takes its revenge).One may fear that Andrei Prikotenko, who belongs to the same generation of directors (graduated from SPGATI in 1998, has headed the Riga Russian Drama Theater since the beginning of the 2006/07 season), has chosen a similar, unpleasantly lightweight fate. About his “Tartuffe”, staged at the Novosibirsk “Red Torch”, after an unsuccessful festival showing, we have to say: perhaps at the premiere performances it was not such a bad performance. However, the director, consistently reducing the pathos of “high comedy”, deliberately whipping up farcical foolishness, ultimately doomed the performance to a coarsening of the acting (at first, apparently, light and lively), to the appearance of clumsiness, to the disintegration of a precariously constructed form. Which, of course, is sad, but natural: the play, released in November before last and not performed for more than six months, could not help but go downhill.
Artist Oleg Golovko built a gloomy space on the stage, oversaturated with incomprehensible devices: hooks, pulleys, blocks, hatches, some kind of funnel with a rotating handle, on top of a huge pipe that curves into the depths of the stage - thick smoke pours out of it from time to time. At first glance, it looks like either a torture chamber or the laboratory of a medieval naturalist. Only later, when Orgon’s household begins to cut up some kind of carcass, it seems, pork and, apparently, real (this is mainly done by the big guy Damis - Andrei Chernykh), knead the minced meat (this is a job for women: Elmira is played by Irina Krivonos, Mariana - Vladislav Saurenko; both are very beautiful), hanging sausages, it becomes clear: in front of us is a butcher shop. And I want to scream like the singer Zemfira: “Well, pa-chi-moo-oo!”
But really: why, say, not a soap factory? What Prikotenko says in the booklet (“Don’t you think that the collision of powerful spirituality and a butcher shop in itself gives a humorous charge?”, etc.), does not sound very convincing, to put it mildly. For myself, I came up with another, philological explanation: Moliere’s comedy is played out as a farce; the word “farce” comes from the Latin farsa (“stuffing”, “minced meat”): minced meat - therefore, sausages and small sausages. But this is too intricate: not at all for the audience for whom Tartuffe was staged.
The farce genre is set from the very first seconds: two gloomy, stocky rogues in black overcoats (later we recognize them as Tartuffe and his servant Laurent), coming to the front of the stage and busily smoking, begin to change the clothes of the third, thin and fidgety. They put a tousled red wig on his head, put two balls of some kind (each the size of a grapefruit) under his T-shirt, and instead of black shoes, put white shoes of at least size forty-five on his feet. The man (Maxim Bityukov) immediately begins to preen himself, diligently portraying a caricature of a broken girl. Of course, you couldn’t think of anything funnier, but who would it be - could it be Dorina’s maid? Well, yes, she is, but what is Dorina doing in such a strange company?
What it does, what it does, what difference does it make? It's funny to you, that's okay. But it’s not funny to me at all, on the contrary: I’m bored and embarrassed for the director, who immediately took common sense and good taste out of the play’s brackets, if by “good taste” we mean a sense of the author’s style and respect for the quality of the form. But maybe Andrei Prikotenko and the Red Torch artists will be able to offer the viewer something in return? I mean, is there anything better than TV laugh-squeeze humor?
Oh, if only. In the actor's consciousness (we are not talking about all the actors of the Novosibirsk theater, but about the majority of Russian actors) a false confidence has long been ingrained - the farce genre justifies the crudest squeeze and the most outright sloppiness. He’s like war: he’ll write off everything. You can repeat as much as you like that farcical acting requires special organicity and is honed over the years, that the farceur needs the infectiousness of a good clown and the dexterity of a more or less decent acrobat - in words everyone will agree with this, but still no one will engage in training.
Well, Soviet sausage for 2.20, greenish and slimy, was also considered sausage. To everyone - bon appetit.
The director's clumsy entertaining inventions, as well as the acting negligence in the Novosibirsk Tartuffe, can be listed for a very long time. Perhaps the biggest criticism is the performance of Maxim Bityukov - Dorina. The point is not only that his role is supposed to make faces more and more desperately than others, but also that a gifted, intelligent actor came to the Golden Mask in bad shape. He could no longer cope with the given pace of the game, especially the pace of patter speech. In theory, Dorina's monologues should sound like a lively chatter, like cheerful machine-gun fire (experienced theatergoers remember, of course, how the amazing Cleant - Yuri Bogatyrev fired across the hall in the play by Anatoly Efros); With Bityukov, alas, everything was crushed into mush. Or, if you prefer, into lumpy minced meat.
Vladimir Lemeshonok (Orgon) was not in a great mood at the Moscow performance either: he did not make a single mistake, the meaning of his performance was always quite clear, but the role clearly did not suit him. Essentially, the performance lasted only on the stages with the participation of Igor Belozerov - Tartuffe. This is really good, meaningful acting work. Very firmly constructed - the artist does not have those opportunities to lose the tone that spoiled the performance of his partners.
Of course, before us again is Tartuffe the criminal, but not a comic bandit a la the hero of “Gentlemen of Fortune” (as Tartuffe is played by Oleg Tabakov in Nina Chusova’s production), but a smart, dangerous: real one. Belozerov, sparkling with his bare skull, most of all resembled the seasoned Yul Brynner (from the time not of “The Magnificent Seven”, but of “Taras Bulba”); There was a sense of seriousness in his performance, which did not exclude a bit of gloomy humor. He tried to joke irresponsibly only once, in the revelation scene: he came up with a new, slightly shrill voice, lax gestures - for my taste, he failed this scene, but he fit into the ensemble.
Was it worth bringing the Novosibirsk “Tartuffe” to the national festival? Well, it was probably worth it. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the Golden Mask expert council to select performances. Apparently, this is a widespread problem: semantic richness disappears from theatrical play; There are more and more entertaining performances, and fewer and fewer nutritional ones. We can already say with confidence that the current season has not gone well in Moscow either - it is much weaker than the previous one. Theatrical tasks are becoming more and more modest (theatrical manners, accordingly, are becoming more and more impudent); the bar is lowered. This hardly gives us the right to talk about the “end of the theatrical era,” but it obliges us to remember how Stanislavsky (we started the conversation with him and will end with him) once tried to outline in a few words the principles of the theater in which he wanted to work. There were four words: lighter, higher, simpler, more fun. Today the theater accepts this “quatrain” by 75%: it wants to be lighter and simpler, but not higher.