Translated material
Mystery of enmity
Andrei Moguchiy staged the play “Ivans” based on Gogol’s story at the Golden Mask
The fact that in the Golden Mask poster “Ivana” by Andrei Moguchy is listed in the category “Best Performances on a Small Stage” seems like a mockery. There is no larger-scale production at the festival - despite the fact that very few spectators can fit in the amphitheater, which hugs the corner of the CIM stage. But when they approach Moguchiy and his artist Alexander Shishkin and, clicking their tongues, admire the scope of their imagination and the breadth of soul of the Alexandrinsky Theater, which decided on such a grandiose project, they just laugh: what are you talking about, this is a small, portable version of the scenery, or what’s the matter? us in Alexandrinka! And it's true.Gogol’s “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” was turned by the Mighty into a mystery that captured the whole world - Mirgorod far to the horizon and up to the skies, and a trivial quarrel due to the fact that one friend in irritation called another a gander, - into an eternal enmity that began in time immemorial and has not ended to this day.
The performance begins when the stage is completely closed from the viewer by a tall wooden fence. It’s as if the audience is in Ivan Ivanovich’s courtyard, somewhere behind it, on a raised platform, like on a choir, a sexton is singing the beginning of Gogol’s story, and on the other side, young singers in robes are singing the continuation, strangely mixing the text with the cackling of a goose. And Ivan Ivanovich himself (Nikolai Marton), sitting among the spectators on the steps, nods contentedly towards the choir: “My sons!” And in the cracks between the boards he examines what Ivan Nikiforovich’s woman is doing there. Then a giant fence will move along the rails, Ivan Ivanovich will enter his friend’s house, they will talk about millet, about the war, about whether the owner will give his neighbor a gun, and the world around will still seem solid, although absurd with this strange singing and cackling. But as soon as Ivan Nikiforovich shouts: “Bring me some vodka!” - behind the wall of the house, as cracked as a fence, everything suddenly moves, begins to hum, lights flash, and it becomes clear that there is immense and terrible chaos there.
Nikolai Marton - Ivan Ivanovich, tall, thin, dry, like an Englishman or an old Petersburger, holds his back, throws his head high and, cutting circles around his neighbor, parts with his characteristic tenor of a slightly nasal timbre. The huge pot-bellied Viktor Smirnov - Ivan Nikiforovich lies like a motionless mountain in the middle of the stage and thumps monosyllables in response to him in a bass voice. This is still psychological theater, a dialogue between two opposite friends, hilarious in its precision, but this is already music - the beginning of that grandiose noise symphony by Alexander Manotskov, the music of chaos, which is about to fill the entire space.
A quarrel happened, and everything moved, moved, rattled - the stage was exposed to the bottom and was littered with crumpled paper, in the depths of it stood the skeleton of a three-story building, looking like an X-rayed Khrushchev building with small apartments. Ivan Nikiforovich lives on the second floor, crushed on his three meters of rubbish - teapots, a couch, an old TV, constantly broadcasting “Swan Lake”. In irritation, he knocks his gun on the ceiling, where Ivan Ivanovich lives above him with the same typical junk, a table under oilcloth and a TV with “Swan”. Men and women in the yard wave their arms to the sounds of morning exercises on the radio. After the words “Moscow time is six o’clock,” the choir, instead of the anthem, will ring out “Oh, Rus', where are you rushing?” At the end of the house there are workers trying to lift a piano to the upper floor on a rope; in the lower floor and the extension there are kitchens, where fluorescent lamps are shining, the burners are burning and the chefs are knocking with their knives. Here the text echoes “Old World Landowners”: “What, Pulcheria Ivanovna, if our house suddenly caught fire, where would we go? “Well, then we’d go into the kitchen.” On the roof of a one-story extension, a tail-coated string duet is playing, somewhere in the depths an orchestra is hiding, the voice of the choir, singing Gogol, rises and falls.
Those who have seen “Ivanov” on the native stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater understand how compressed the portable space of the performance is. There the audience sat right on the stage, and the immeasurable height of the theater grates opened up above them, but here the ceiling literally sits on the scenery, and they even had to cut off another floor with a dovecote from the Khrushchev building. There, to the right of the main playing area, stretched a huge proscenium, along which rattling horse carts rode freely, and on the edge stood a lonely wooden outhouse with a falling door against the backdrop of the seats of the auditorium, lost in the distance like fields. In the hall of the Central Museum, this whole free, populous world became cramped, horses and carts could hardly pass between the buildings, and for lack of distance, the toilet was hung on the platform above the stage in the form of a rusty toilet. In Alexandrinka it seemed that we were watching Brownian movement in a world gone crazy from somewhere from afar and from above; there it was especially clear how amazingly Mighty managed Shishkin’s complex, multi-layered, divergent space, how he knew how to disperse and decentralize action. Here we are looking from below and point-blank, and the performance seems to be going on in close-ups all the time.
When everything moved, moved and began to roar, Gogol’s story began to thicken, turn into a nightmare, into the terrible dreams of Ivan Ivanovich, dreaming of revenge. The roof of the house came down from the sky, a woman flew out of the chimney and hovered in the heights, waving a controversial gun like a witch with a broom. Then, cackling and waving his wide white sleeves, a dwarf gander (Alexey Ingelevich) climbed onto the roof. In the gloomy madness of sleep, he seems to Ivan Ivanovich as a son (here scenes from Taras Bulba fit into the “Tale”). Meanings multiply and get in the way: amid “old world” conversations about food, cooks from Khrushchev’s kitchen carry a “gander” on a platter, but he is already dressed in royal clothes embroidered with gold, and when Ivan Ivanovich aims a gun at him with the words “I gave birth to you...” .”, the killer turns out to be not only Taras Bulba, but also Ivan the Terrible, who kills his son. And then Afanasy Ivanovich - he twists the arm of the prince-"gander" out of the sleeve of the prince, like a bird's leg, and gnaws it with appetite.
The terrible dream ended, the roof flew off, revealing underneath the Mirgorod court with many typewriters - they are knocking, the judges are chattering, the velvety voice of “Theater at the Microphone” reads fragments of Gogol’s “Tale”, which serve both as a conductor of the action and as a counterpoint to it. The rhythm and accents in the scenes are interrupted either by construction noise, the screech of a circular saw, or by shouts, singing and the rumble of wheels. Sometimes the voice of a mother calling is heard in the distance: “Vanya, come home!” Mighty builds up the sound environment of the performance as densely, complexly and with the same differences as the space.
By the end, the fences move out again, and the scene narrows again, the point is that the enmity has been going on for hundreds of years and by the time of the attempt at reconciliation, the Ivans are already lying in tin coffins. And when peace fails, the woman, who in the program is designated as “Baba in general” (Svetlana Smirnova was in turn a farm girl, a witch, and a mother), starts a long gloomy song from the finale of “Terrible Revenge” about the inseparable Cossacks who became such enemies, that their hatred remained beyond the grave. Only the name of these Cossacks is not Ivan da Petro, as in that fairy tale, but Ivan da Ivan.