Death of the dictionary

At the Meyerhold meetings they showed “Quartet” directed by Matthias Langhoff

A year ago, Valery Fokin at the Meyerhold Center undertook to hold annual Meyerhold meetings, inviting world directors' stars to present their latest premieres. Last time, Krzysztof Warlikowski, a Polish director of the new generation, brought “Krum” based on the play by Hanoch Levin - a play about the mid-life crisis and dashed hopes. And he received a special Meyerhold prize. This year, CIM invited a director from the generation of masters - the German Matthias Langhoff with the play “Quartet” based on the play by Heiner Müller, one of the main postmodern playwrights.

For the organizers of the Meyerhold meetings, it was important that the director, having arrived in Moscow for the first time four years ago with the Genoese production of “The Government Inspector,” already swore by the name of the Master and in that performance quoted Meyerhold’s masterpiece along with the entire Russian avant-garde. But for Langhoff’s new production, the chain that reached him from Meyerhold through Müller and Brecht was more important. And all the stages of this path, on which there was a consistent alienation of the actor from the character, from time, the literary source and, finally, in general from the text and his own gender. I'll tell you in order.

The famous play by the classicist Heiner Müller (14 years ago it was staged in a poetic-aesthetic spirit by the Greek Terzopoulos with Alla Demidova and Dmitry Pevtsov) is based on the novel “Dangerous Liaisons” by Chaderlos de Laclos. Müller himself once wrote, under the title “Quartet,” as a footnote for those who don’t understand, “according to Laclos.” But as in any postmodern text, those who do not understand are not included in the play - the tension of the play is built on its connection-hostility with the original source. Müller also has an introductory remark: “The time of action: the Salon before the French Revolution and the Bunker after the Third World War.” Langhoff didn’t need it either: he plays out Müller’s battles not in a salon or in a bunker, but in a dilapidated cemetery overlooking the modern city. The alcove here is a rusty car, the meal is prepared on a tombstone, instead of furniture there is a two-story section of boxes taken from God knows where from a gilded velvet theater, and overhead there is a huge billboard on which views, snippets of classic films, operas, paintings, and cartoons are constantly projected about the sailor Popeye and similar garbage of civilization, designed to be an endless commentary on life on the graves.

Valmont and Merteuil are played by the eminent artists of the Comédie Française, Muriel Mayette and François Chateau, who united under the roof of a small theater with the funny name “Rumpelpumpel” especially for this occasion. But the heroes do not look like brilliant wits and cynics, these are two middle-aged, tired tramps who, like Beckett’s heroes, wait endlessly for unknown things in the area abandoned by God and people. She, at first walking around in stale underwear, puts on a dress with a crinoline and pulls on a curly wig to portray the Marquise Merteuil, and then takes pants and a jacket from the linen pile and becomes Valmont, while He, having been Valmont, himself fits into her dress and is already conducting a dialogue on behalf of the beautiful Tourvel. Then again a change of costumes, and now She, in a cape and mask, finds herself seduced by little Volange, and He is again by Valmont. During breaks between games, the characters, like an old married couple in front of the TV, sit on a hill and chew, looking at a billboard when it shows them, only washed and sitting at a decorous dinner with the ongoing murmur of dialogue.

Here, with our love for psychological theater and writing stories, we could speculate about the games of hatred that heroes play out of boredom, despair and hopelessness. Let’s remember other stories about mortal battles on the field of sex, especially since Langhoff himself gives us comparisons, for example, with Strindberg’s “Mistress Julie.” But these will be arguments that lead far away from the performance. Because the French production from the very beginning turns out to be only a spectacular and paradoxical vessel for Heiner Müller's text - a sickeningly thick concentrate of Eros and Thanatos. And there is no rapid exchange of brilliant witticisms, like Laclau’s, not because the characters’ words are given to old tramps who lack passion, but because this performance is not connected with a person at all. This is text. It consists of self-contained monologues about sex and death, and not a single monologue cares how it is answered. These monologues are composed of brilliant - meaningful and ironic, apt and disgusting aphorisms, each of which is indifferent to its neighbor. "Eternity is a prolonged erection." The hero, who puts on a flabby male body a dress with a crinoline that does not fasten on him, has no less reason to speak on behalf of the unapproachable beauty than the heroine. They have no gender - they are not characters, but walking text, a self-speaking play. And it is symbolic that the hero, poisoned in the image of Tourville, before his death says from himself: “I am a dying dictionary.”

Towards the end, the car will be turned over, and its bottom will turn out to be a smaller copy of the scenery, also composed by Langhoff. Only instead of a confusing video, the bespectacled face of the skeptic Heiner Müller will be watching from a small billboard.

Dina GODER