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The Chekhov Festival has ended

The girl selflessly gives herself to her friend in the hairdresser's chair that belongs to her dad, a Quebec barber. Dad catches them and beats the guy; he does not remain in debt. After some time, a drunken noble father loses to smithereens his daughter (who has already grown a belly) in a poker game to a visiting Chinese - and although it is somewhere in the thirties of the twentieth century and this is happening in Canada, and not on a slave plantation, the daughter goes to a new owner (aka husband). And then the entire performance - five and a half hours, three intermissions - Robert Lepage tells us stories worthy of a Brazilian series.

The four acts of the “Dragon Trilogy,” brought to Moscow by the Canadian theater Ex Machina, record four different eras: the thirties, the war forties, the year 1955 and the year 1985. During these eras, the life in Canada of that same girl Jeanne and her friend Françoise is traced. The baby born to Zhanna falls ill with meningitis and stops developing. Her mother is then diagnosed with cancer and, following the diagnosis, hangs herself. An adult girl, hooting and mooing like a baby, is admitted to a hospital for the mentally retarded; there she is killed by an orderly, to whom she threw some medicine into the eyes. There is also a “Japanese” line of events - an American soldier abandons an Okinawan woman as soon as it turns out that she will have a child (and the unfortunate woman pursues him with cries of “I’m a geisha, not a prostitute”); a Chinese husband who treats his wife’s daughter as his own child, a friend Françoise who toils that she has no children (but in the end she does have children), and a visiting Englishman whom the Chinese hooks up with at the beginning of the play opium; at the end of the performance, a disabled person already using heroin commits self-immolation.

The director (who is also one of the co-authors of the play, written by a friendly team of six people) demonstrates all these misfortunes to the public colorfully and enthusiastically. The sick girl's mouth curls wildly and her eyes widen; if a woman gives birth on stage, then she suffers almost for real; The orderly grabs the patient's throat professionally and mercilessly. But these are not all the misfortunes of humanity that Lepage depicts (and don’t tell me that it is he who seeks to evoke compassion for the unfortunate in the audience - such a density of catastrophes speaks of a stupid, zoo-like interest in human misfortunes, this feeling that makes people watch programs about car accidents - “well, it’s amazing how they crashed, but I’m sitting here, alive and well”). There is also, of course, war - and Lepage gives out on stage all the platitudes that can be said about it.

Well, yes, the war tramples the everyday human world - and now the officers, who have just been skating while on leave, are marching in these same skates around a shoe store owned by a Chinese man. He keeps lining up three pairs of shoes in a row - men's, women's, children's, and they trample on these shoes, scattering them, driving them into the dust. And there is also a war not only in Europe, but also in Asia (which is equally far from Canada); That’s why we are reminded of the existence of kamikazes and the existence of Hiroshima.

In general, the further the play goes, the more it seems that the director intends his work for the unfortunate, who suffered from some nasty disease in childhood or, at the very least, only completed primary school. Any thought is chewed; any action is repeated at least three times (“well, did you finally understand? Do you understand?”), the audience should obviously learn about the same suicide pilots for the first time from the play. And the absolutely unknown fact that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was called “Little Boy” by the Americans should completely amaze the audience, force them to connect in their heads this touching fact with the dense variations on the “children’s” theme spread in the play, and make her pull out her handkerchiefs.

The finale of the play is congenial to the whole performance: all the hardships of the twentieth century are behind us, a couple destined for each other happily meets - the granddaughter of that Japanese woman who was a geisha, and not something else, and the son is already deeply gray-haired and quarrelsome (however, she has always been like that) Françoise. And of course, they will be happy, but they cannot be happy plumbers, salesmen or teachers. Of course, they are artists: a young man sculpts the Milky Way from light bulbs, and a girl draws dragons. The Chekhov Festival, which over the course of two months presented a collection of excellent performances in Moscow (Robert Sturua, Peter Brook, Matthew Bourne, Pina Bausch, and Declan Donellan), ended suddenly on a note of serially reverent performance. But this is probably even correct: no one knew better than Chekhov that vulgarity cannot be avoided.

Anna GORDEEVA