From space

Two of Brook's performances were shown at the Chekhov Festival

Two performances by Peter Brook were brought to the Chekhov Festival - a director who has been considered among the greats since the mid-sixties, when he brought his Shakespearean productions to Moscow. Since then, Brook has rarely visited Russia; his main works, such as the grandiose multi-hour “Mahabharata”, played in the open air in Avignon, were seen on pirated video only by the most inquisitive theatergoers. But if you ask a student at a theater university about foreign directors of the second half of the twentieth century, he, without thinking, like “the poet is Pushkin, the fruit is an apple,” will blurt out: “Brooke, Strehler.” Italian Giorgio Strehler died ten years ago. The Englishman Brooke, who has been working in France for a long time and is in his eighty-third year, continues to stage plays. And these productions, no matter how the audience and critics react to them, are part of the history of the theater. Simply because Brook directed them.

We received two small productions from Brooke's Bouffe du Nord theater - "Sizwe Banzi Died" based on a South African play from the apartheid era and "The Grand Inquisitor" based on "The Brothers Karamazov". The festival organizers were happy: there were no problems with customs - the entire theater environment fit in a few suitcases. Indeed, Brook staged both performances, as they say, “on the mat.” In the one-man show based on Dostoevsky, there are only two stools on stage - for Bruce Myers, playing the Inquisitor, and his silent listener - Christ. In “Sizwe Banzi...” two actors use some improvised junk: cardboard boxes, a mop, a frame representing a doorway. It's not about the setting, it's about the actors, and not about their conceptually special existence, but simply about the fact that real people appear on stage. Once the king of directors, philosopher and experimenter, Brooke fell into “unheard-of simplicity” with age. His director's gaze is now devoid of anger and partiality, there is only calm interest in it, as if he is looking from space.

We were especially curious to see “The Grand Inquisitor”: it is this inserted parable from “The Brothers Karamazov” that stands at the center of the recently released nervous and sick “Ridiculous Poem” by Kama Ginkas. I wanted to compare Brook's longtime artist Bruce Myers with Igor Yasulovich, who plays the same huge monologue for Ginkas. In the Youth Theater performance, behind the Inquisitor there were cripples and crosses, televisions with documentary cruelties and other challenges of today. But while playing, Yasulovich seemed to push aside the annoying momentariness and walk straight into the hall with the dry rage of his Grand Inquisitor, his broken pride and bitter mind, and in an obvious struggle with God, admitting defeat in advance. Bruce Myers didn't have to fight anything. He stood alone in the middle of a small square of the stage and told Karamazov’s parable, almost without addressing the young Christ sitting next to him. He did not try to look like an Inquisitor, but was precisely a storyteller - calm and intelligent, he tried to speak clearly and skillfully raised his tone in particularly pathetic places. It was interesting to watch a good artist, but it had nothing to do with us.

“Sizwe Banzi...” looked different. A play from the 70s about life in the South African ghetto told a plot reminiscent of “The Death of Tarelkin.” Sizwe Banzi, whose life has come to a standstill because he does not have permission to live in the city where he can only make money, takes valid documents from the pocket of a randomly discovered corpse and decides to take a new name in order to change his fate. The narrator - the lively and artistic Habib Dembele - introduces us to this story with the spontaneity and humor of the soul of the company. He dances, winks at the audience, growls like a machine and creaks like a door, he portrays each of the heroes - groaning and hobbling if we are talking about an old man, spreading his arms and puffing out his cheeks if he is talking about a fat man. A true street performer is funny, observant and over the top. And then the hero (Pitcho Womba Konga) appears - a naive bumpkin who came from the village, who does not understand why he cannot stay in the city to earn a living for his wife and four children left in the village. And with it, dramatic and social lines are woven into the plot. Indeed: “What do they want from me? What's wrong with me? How am I worse than your husband, madam? - as the hero, tipsy and confused by his misfortunes, asks the girl from the front row.

The performance turns out to be charmingly simple-minded, without a second thought or a double bottom - a little touching, a little funny and designed for the same ingenuously open-minded audience. Such a theater would look best in a dense circle of street audiences, in a square in the middle of those very townships - urban districts that are being discussed here. Signed with Brook's name, performed on the stage of the Meyerhold Center, accustomed to experiments, it looks almost shockingly naive in the program of the reputable Chekhov Festival. But no, it’s just the same detached view of the director from space, from where the arguments with God from Dostoevsky’s novel and the sad and funny everyday stories of South Africans look equally distant. That's how they live there.

Dina GODER