But we don't care

"Hare. Love story" at the Sovremennik Theater

The main joke in the play (and this is a comedy, at least that’s how the genre is designated in the program) is this: an elderly actress, moonlighting as a toastmaster at corporate parties, tells her ex-husband about her favorite toast. This is a wish that the life of those toasting would rush along like a troika “along a sleigh track.” When pronouncing the ex-husband, he adds one letter “s” to the word “sleigh”, removes one “n” - and the resulting phrase is repeatedly pronounced with such a delivery, with such an acting feeling that not every line of Oscar Wilde or Bernard Shaw is awarded. It would seem, why write about this performance at all, you never know in Moscow there is a lot of entrepreneurial vulgarity? But it’s not an enterprise at all. But - just hold on to the chairs, don’t fall - Sovremennik Theater. Directed by Galina Volchek. And the main roles (more precisely, the only roles, this is a duet performance) are Nina Doroshina and Valentin Gaft.

I composed this story about a meeting of a Muscovite who came to some outback for a hack job (smear herself with stain, impersonate a famous black singer, open her mouth to a soundtrack, get a fee and leave), with her ex, Nikolai, who is now working as a lighting designer in this outback at a local cultural center Kolyada. His play was originally called “The Old Hare” (in her youth, the heroine and her husband portrayed hares in a children’s fairy tale), the theater staged a more tempting title - “Hare. Love story." There are lovers of Kolyada’s work who believe that the author listens carefully and accurately reproduces the language of the street; I don't belong to them. In his plays (at least in “The Hare” one hundred percent) he sweeps away verbal garbage. His characters talk in ancient jokes, snatches of pop songs, scraps of some slogans, stupid sayings. It is absolutely impossible to listen to all this. “Mmm, in short...” - “Whoever has it shorter sits at home and grows it.” Yeah. Doroshina and Gaft.

Gaft has nothing to play in this play - well, don’t consider portraying a drunk with a kind heart a worthy task for a superpro. Yes, he convincingly touches the bottle, drinks from the bottle, and quacks. His hero looks with sad eyes at his ex-wife. He drinks and watches for ten minutes. He drinks and watches for twenty minutes. At some point he suddenly remembers that he is an actor and reads a piece from Othello. Bitterly, measuredly, he reads like this. Then he looks at the heroine again. And he drinks.

Doroshina, on the contrary, is all energy, all is transformation. Her heroine strives to get used to the image of an exotic singer, dances, learns English lyrics, the actress is no longer even fifty, but her legs in black tights flash in the air (she is wearing a Papuan outfit with a miniskirt made of ribbons, tassels, some kind of almost serpentine bullshit) will make the corps de ballet of some “Todes” groan with envy. She moves well and starts the role well - in the scene where she is still lying alone on the sofa in a hotel room and calling home to Moscow. These intonations - of a Moscow guest in Ust-Uryupinsk, surprised that there are still places in the world where long-distance conversation must be ordered using coupons - are reproduced remarkably accurately. But as soon as the dialogue begins, the truthfulness of the intonation disappears. The actors need to play a meeting thirty years later, unforgotten love, quite strong feelings, but the text is filled with garbage from which these feelings cannot be extracted. And Doroshina begins to pull these feelings out of herself, pedaling the intonation and starting to scream.

By the end of the performance there are only Doroshina’s screams and the same tragically frozen Gaft. For what offenses the artistic director of the theater decided to cast two wonderful actors in this play is unknown.

Anna GORDEEVA