Mirror and its fragments

A thriller from Yekaterinburg was shown at the Golden Mask

At the play “The Pillowman” of the Yekaterinburg Youth Theater, shown at the “Golden Mask”, you experience a slight feeling of deja vu. The same tiny hall of the branch of the Theater named after. Pushkin as a year ago, the same stuffiness, slowness and McDonagh of a thick provincial batch. If you look for the work that is closest in form and rhythm to Oleg Goetze’s production, it will turn out to be not the Serebrennikov attraction at all (remember, “The Pillow Man” directed by Kirill Serebrennikov is shown at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater), but rather “The Lonely West” of the Perm theater “U” bridge." It was also nominated as “Best Small Dramatic Performance” a year ago and was performed here on the small stage. Before our eyes, Martin McDonagh's black tragicomedies, which for some reason are considered thrillers, are not only acquiring Russian stage history, but are also acquiring local production traditions. The first of them is to play in such a way that people will definitely believe it.

“The Pillowman,” “Guignol for adults only,” was directed by Yekaterinburg Youth Theater actor Oleg Getze, who was also nominated for “Mask” personally - for playing the main role in his play. His Katurian Katurian is a quiet, tolerant and, in general, completely harmless intellectual writer. During interrogations, and the setting of the play is the dungeons of some unnamed totalitarian state, he obediently answers the questions of the bad and good policemen, demonstrating Buddhist indifference to his own fate and the surrounding reality. They ask him about his creativity - in the city, someone has begun to stage his creepy stories about little boys and girls (they have their fingers cut off, fed apple men with razor blades, and even crucified on a homemade cross). Katurian feels sorry for children, like any decent person, but he still doesn’t care much about them, and he perks up somewhat only when it comes to stories he’s written, and not about mysterious murders. True, it soon becomes clear that Katurian is involved in crimes not only with words, but also with blood: his brother, who has mental problems, took the bedtime stories his brother told him as a direct guide to action.

The beauty and at the same time the weighty pitfall of McDonagh's play, which received the Laurence Olivier Award in 2004, lies in the fact that nothing can be done with it - neither subtract nor add. The plot, connected not just in one, but in ten knots, requires that it be reproduced in its entirety, without cuts, otherwise the brilliant intellectual structure begins to crumble. In the Yekaterinburg production, all these somewhat tedious internal branches, interweavings and rhymes are not only not clarified, but are even more confused. There is practically no change of action - long, almost motionless, sparsely populated scenes: Katurian with investigators or with his brother, monotonous plots of the stories “Apple Men”, “House by the River”, “Pillow Man”, “The Green Pig”. Associations swell and burst like buds on trees. Fathers and sons, goodness and violence, literature and reality, words and responsibility - it’s not so easy to play about everything and nothing at once. The situation is aggravated by the scenery. In the background there is a broken mirror, in which characters are reflected from time to time. Sometimes the lighting changes and the mirror turns into a giant cracked glass - not too specific, but the hint is generally clear. The world is unstable, the human psyche is unreliable, and the border between good and evil is just a thin film.

However, the essences are multiplied not only by the text, but also by the performance itself, which is not accidentally called guignol. Of course, there is no shortage of tales of atrocity and torture, and some minor characters like the brothers' parents act out as outright farce, suddenly appearing on either side of the stage in an ominous red light and waving their arms. But the word “guignol” comes into place here in its first, “puppet” meaning. All the characters have their own doll doubles, who create and show independent performances to the public during breaks in the main action. This is interesting, but now we have to understand not only the role of literature in a particular world, but also the relationship between a doll and a person, as well as theater and reality. The program is very intense, but I’m afraid it’s difficult to cope with it in three hours, especially when it’s stuffy in the hall.

Yulia CHERNIKOVA